I certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

It's hard for bands to stick it out because people grow up, and it never really pays off. If you're looking for some sort of payoff, it's not gonna happen.

Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words.

I grew up in the early '70s in New England.

It's American Alternative radio stations that bug me. We're considered Alternative, but don't expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and Offspring. We're hardly of that generation.

I was surrounded by nature and trying to come to terms with this blissful nature versus the inhumane mentality of war. People were being deluded by someone using the word peace.

We're like old people now playing music. I'm so glad we stuck it out because it's a lot better. I used to feel kind of anxious. Now our apprenticeship is over.

I certainly don't sit around in the morning making pancakes listening to Whitehouse or anything.

I never do releases to try and make or break some contemporary band.

Anyone who grows up with parents who are very influential, there are cases where people run away from that if they have parents who are really lame.

Buddhism has become a socially recognized religious philosophy for Americans, whereas it used to be considered an exotic religion.

We're all very sensitive that Jim has the shortest history with the band. He wants to be somewhat of a free agent. I'm just going to let time dictate how Jim's future evolves.

Rock'n'roll saved my soul.

I have to reign myself in a lot.

I never go back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill comes when the balance can be attained. Everyone in the room can have a shared, communal rock experience.

Kids think of us as being totally over the hill.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

Traditional songwriting, to us, is where the experimental nature comes in. We're all involved with so much outside activity with really hardcore, experimental music-making.

I don't really care about, Oh I really have to sell these things.

We never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don't really have it.

A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.

The band has a liberal philosophy - that's sort of a given.

I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.

No one really gets rich doing this. A couple people do, Black Sabbath does. We don't sell any records anymore.

We're playing all these weird festivals, usually outdoors.

Whenever I can afford to do something, I do it.

Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music.

Buddhism has become a socially recognized religious philosophy for Americans whereas it used to be considered an exotic religion.

Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it

My romantically favorite era is 78, 79 listening to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4, the live tapes, echo chamber and break beats.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

I love listening to Radio Head's 'Everything in its Right Place' because it's all major chords, it makes you feel really good. It's soothing, it's got a beautiful voice, crazy textures. When I'm down I listen to that song and it really makes me feel good.

I have a 6-year-old, and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car, and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I'm really working on him about that.

Fancy your having no sunshine in London yesterday! Here it was glorious, like full summer, and I sat up with the window wide open, listening to the discourse of two amorous thrushes.

I was growing up listening to Queen. Freddie Mercury threw those incredible melodies into his songs.

I just love listening to the laughter.

I was up until all hours of the night, listening to stories, meeting great old comedians.

There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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

The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.

Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.

Whatever had been on the radio in the '60s; I mean we were always listening to the radio.

Because of the changes in the Padres team I played with last year, I felt like a veteran recently when I worked out with Jason Kendall and he told me he's liked listening to my records since he was a kid!

I think listening to real classic soul material made me learn how to feel music that's sung.

All of my style came from listening to records.

I had to be at least 8 or 9; I was listening to everything on the radio. You name it, I heard every song.