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

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 have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me - art is the way human beings express what we can't say in words.

If you want to have a good life, you should focus on your family, on your business, on your dog, on your fun, and you'll have a good life.

In ancient, prehistoric times, the temples of the spirit were outwardly visible, but today, when our life has become so unspiritual, they no longer exist where we can see them with our physical eyes. Yet spiritually they are still present everywhere, and whoever seeks can find them.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

I believe in the American Dream, because I've lived it.

All ideas come about through some sort of observation. It sparks an attitude; some object or emotion causes a reaction in the other person.

Pole vaulting is an event of high and lows.

Be Honest when you are with your kids, because you see your past in their eyes and they see their future in yours.

Purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry, because it represents a future and the others do not.

The Russians have a lot at stake, and the power of Moscow pride should never be underestimated.

No other version, no matter how perfect it is, would ever feel better than being your true self.

I think I've got a funny face.

Life's Tragedy is that we get old to soon and wise too late.

I have tried to make the music a bit easier for them to understand.

My life's experiences, I've always had, my uncle used to call it antenna. I know what's going to happen oftentimes before it happened when it's involving me.

Most women do not realize that heart disease is the #1 killer of American women.

The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

If my father Ninoy Aquino were alive today, he would say that he is not superman or superboy. In effect, heroes are really just ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times and respond properly.

If I start going back to church, I'd have to stop the smoking and drinking, and I wouldn't be able to curse any more.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.

I had this idea that I would write a companion cookbook to 'Barbara the Slut.' The recipes would be like, 'Put the Lucky Charms in the bowl.'

Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.