I never really followed grunge.

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.

I started off with the really funky stuff like Ramsey Lewis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Burrell.

I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying.

Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with.

By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job.

I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.

I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me.

From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home.

Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71.

I never really followed grunge.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting.

By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso.

It was just like Howlin' Wolf. Once you arrive at the point that you understand it, the emotional factor is darker than some of the saddest blues stuff.

I quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands.

I learned piano off YouTube and still do a lot. It's hard to find contemporary indie music on there, at least lessons, because the reach is smaller. I did it so people like me out there could learn my songs if they wanted to and maybe, in a small way, to pay forward all the free lessons I've had over the years.

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

I really missed going to college. I missed not having that education and that experience.

A tardy vengeance shares the tyrant's guilt.

I don't have to worry about writing jokes. I just tell stories about things that have happened to me. As long as I'm alive and I'm living and I'm experiencing different things every day, the show will always change.

My favorite types of movies definitely aren't thrillers, but at the same time you can't deny the genius of Hitchcock's films.

Since I was 13, I've been buying things because they are ridiculously cheap.

When I meet with most entrepreneurial teams, I ask them a simple question: How do you know that you're making progress? Most of them really can't answer that question.

Every author has to eventually write a food book.

When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but, as it had been established by force, it still needed force to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes.

It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities life is worth living and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.

A lot of violence, a lot of gore in it, and I just didn't want to do that kind of thing.

Around '75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper for them to just buy a sound system than it was to hire a band.

Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.

I'm an ambassador for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and one of the children, his wish was to go to the Emmys, so he's going to be my date, along with my husband, and my dad and his girlfriend. So we're going to have a really fun night and it's going to be really exciting. I'm really excited for him to experience that.

Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 30. Somewhere around 1992, he should have had to go out and get a real job.

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

The films that have influenced me and the films that have motivated me and inspired me were films that resonated, films that made me think after I saw them.

I watch clothes on other people, and it's like having a conversation before opening your mouth. For me, clothes come from the mind. They represent what's happening inside, and as long as they feel honestly like what I'm thinking about and going toward, I'm happy to bounce around and experience different things.

I'm thankful to God for having a family that's been there for me. He's been there from the time I was a child to even now with my family helping with my little boy. It's worth more than words could ever describe. That's one of the ways I've been able to stay grounded is thanks to family and God.

The Space Shuttle will stop directly below the Space Station and Sergei and I will be looking out two different windows looking straight down at the Space Shuttle.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

I've played a ghost, cat, snake. I've been funny, sad. I've been filmed flying on screen. So why not spend time on something else? I don't need to accept everything I'm offered.