"As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again."

"Stop making sense"

"Music isn't fragile."

"When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings."

"Patience is a virtue but I don't have the time."

"Years ago I was an angry young man I'd pretend that I was a billboard standing tall by the side of the road I fell in love with the beautiful highway"

"Some of you people just about missed it"

"Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that’s when the details take on larger meanings."

"Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can’t conceive of it being an isolated thing. It’s whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day."

"It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order."

"Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance."

"It was the best show I’d ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible."

"Temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings."

"Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters."

"Facts just twist the truth around."

"People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes."

"Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature."

"I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it."