I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.
There’s a place on my arm where I’ve written her name next to mine.
I like Thelonious Monk, he’s so gnarled, he’s like a piece of machinery that’s pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.
Presley’s what I go by, why don’t you change the station.
There’s only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It’s not that I didn’t do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas.
You choke my days, I’ll choke yours.
If you’re a writer, you know that the stories don’t come to you – you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that’s where the stories were.
Cross my wooden leg, swear on my glass eye.
What you want is for music to love you back. That’s why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.
She pulls a razor from her boot and a thousand victims fall around her feet.
I have an audio stigmatism whereby I hear things wrong – I have audio illusions.
I hope I’m becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain.
You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don’t want to live any other way.
I don’t really like listening to the radio so much.
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that’s all there was on the jukebox.
You hope people are going to be listening to you after you’re gone. And they like you better after you’re gone.
Planes and Trains and Boats and Busses Characteristically Evolve a common attitude of blue Unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport And the cargo that they’re carrying is you.
I didn’t really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y’know? And a world I could call my own.
Popular music is like a big party, and it’s a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat gets a chance to speak.
If you are recording, you are recording. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.