When I was 14 years old, I was a huge fan of the Velvets, the Stooges and the Modern Lovers. They are my three favourite bands. I never get sick of 'em.

When I write a song, it's all about the riff - the riff first, then the words come later.

See, to me, rock'n'roll doesn't have any point. It's just fun. It has a million different angles and they're all valid. But I think rock might be a world issue.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

Even the bands I dig don't have a history of attaining mass consumption.

I used to have a sort of spiky haircut and it just feels better to have short hair again.

Basically, between 1989 and 1994, I hadn't taken a vacation.

Rock stars wanting to write is even worse than wanting to act in movies, right?

But Sneaky Pete was great. I didn't bug him about Gram. Not too much, anyway.

For me, it's all about The Dubliners by James Joyce. I love The Dead.

I've got time, I hope, to make lots of quiet records. So quiet you won't be able to hear them.

CDs, too. Totally corporate. They look real cheap and soulless and they don't smell of anything.

I lie around and play guitar, that's something I do for sure. In fact that's all I do, I think.

It is hard, though, 'cos record labels love to boss you around. I won't let them do that anymore.

I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

Since Elizabeth, I certainly live a healthier lifestyle.

It's better when you have your wife with you, more fun.

I was trying to spend it as quickly as possible. Because I'm so lazy, all that money created a block. I was flying around the world, staying at fancy hotels, having fun and trying to get rid of it as quickly as possible, so I could get on with some more work.

My high-school dream was to be in a band, pay my rent and eat - and I've been able to do that for 20 years. So I'm completely content.

Some of our stuff ends up looking too corporate. I'm going to be a lot stricter from now on.

I need the money. People don't understand how little money you make in a band.

I guess I'm about ready to promote myself in a more human way. I don't feel quite so insecure.

I'd forgotten what it was like to play music and have it be fun so I decided to stop. I wasn't even sure if I was going to make a new record, I was just kinda quitting.

When there are no women on the tour it can get awful and ugly - constant horrible jokes and gross behaviour. It needs to be leavened with a feminine presence.

But ya have to make videos in the States. Usually ours just look too serious. We haven't got it together.

When I was 14 years old, I was a huge fan of the Velvets, the Stooges and the Modern Lovers. They are my three favourite bands. I never get sick of 'em.

The best songs I write in 20 minutes.

I was hanging out with Jonathan Richman last night.

I don't like alcohol, but I still like to mess around with other stuff occasionally. I think it's important I take mushrooms and acid. They're certainly not addictive, so I can't rule that out.

I have to make rock records occasionally.

Among absent lovers, ardor always fares better.

French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.

I have considered rap music stars, and there is one in my new book, Lovers and Players, and there is also a hip-hop music mogul who I think you will like a lot.

The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.

I had previously been in the band the Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman.

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

Eventually you love people - friends or lovers - because of their flaws.

The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

The reason that lovers never weary each other is because they are always talking about themselves.

When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that's when the silence comes closer; that's when next isn't the least bit theoretical or abstract.

The love story for me was the nature of the love and not the age of the lovers.

We Greeks are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.

Lovers have a right to betray you... friends don't.

Women who have had no lovers, or having had one, two or three, have not found a husband, have perhaps rather had a miss than a loss, as men go.

Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.