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.

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.

You might think that it would he the natural desire of every man to develop as an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true.

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.

No book is really worth reading at age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty.

No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension - those moments in which character is forged and revealed.

What I want out of my career is just to work.

The Four Horsemen were limousines and Lear Jets, while DX was trailer parks and outhouses. One was white trash, one was upper crust. I always saw DX and the NWO as the natural rivals at the time.

When you believe in people, you motivate them and release their potential.

I really wish that I would have gone to college. Even my son, who's into rap himself, I tell him and tell his children, 'Go to college. Get that education - it is so important. Don't do like I did.' I had all this singing on my mind, and I just didn't have time for it.

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

I am healing.

I've learned you can't write on a computer on a bus. It jiggles too much, especially an Apple. The keyboard jiggles around too much, and there are too many typos.

Our flaws are obvious yet we are loved and able to love if we choose because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

I text a lot people, because it's how I stay connected with all my family and friends when I'm on set and traveling.

Martin Sheen is my pinup! And Allison Janney, oh my God. They're brilliant actors.

As a director, I've wanted to have adventure in my life, creative adventure. I think it's partly because I grew up, basically from age six to 26, mostly on television series where the producers find something that works and then do it over and over and over again.

Where will I be five years from now? I delight in not knowing. That's one of the greatest things about life, its wonderful surprises.

The commune movement is part of a reawakening of belief in the possibilities for utopia that existed in the nineteenth century and exist again today, a belief that by creating the right social institution, human satisfaction and growth can be achieved.

In Washington, the translation of E Pluribus Unum has been lost. The belief that we are one nation - united in purpose - caring about and for one another is no longer the practice.

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird occupation in and of itself.

In TV, when you're doing guest roles, you're gliding into a zone where people are already very comfortable. They go in and go to work every day. You're coming in, and it's a brand-new environment, so you have to get it... and then you're gone again.

It's always very strange to have your life dramatized because it never happens like that. Things will be different.

I am very self-critical, but that's a good thing because it keeps me growing as a human being and as a musician.