I had a terrible time with feminists in the Seventies. They hated me, those women. I think they hated everything.

I never tried to revolutionise photography; I just do what I do and keep my fingers crossed that people will like it.

Rather than knowing more, I think I've got more open-minded.

I hate men who are in touch with their feminine side.

I like change. There's something Buddhist about it - continuous change is wonderful.

I am mad about my wife.

All my ex-girlfriends or wives are all kind of great friends and I've never understood somebody who can live with somebody for five or six years and then not like them.

I did painting before I did photography.

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.

Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.

I know everything should be photographed. It helps me make sense of my existence.

I suppose because my work was so popular people didn't really look at it.

Nothing wrong with retouching - nothing new about retouching.

I love people for giving me their time. It's a privilege - I make the most of it.

When I stop working, I go out and start working again. Most people paint a picture, or whatever they do, and go home. For me, it has to be continuous.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

Girls are more attractive to me than dresses.

You have to kind of be invisible when you photograph children, so you use a longer lens.

I don't think my work does reflect my nationality - I don't like the idea of nationalism.

I don't think it matters where I came from any more.

I'm never shocked, I'm not the shockable type!

I have never met an ugly woman.

I am not responsible for all the journalists in the past that have told lies.

Journalists never make it clear when you are joking.

I have always had a blank spot where my regret is supposed to be.

Some nights I'm funny with the between-song commentary, some nights I'm not. I have no control over this. I pace the stage a lot and struggle with the mic stand in a ridiculous way.

It frustrated me at college that all the acts in the Top 10 were like The Moody Blues and Phil Collins. It was like why did we get stuck with the last generation's music, why can't we have our own?

Silver Jews was always a coolection of old friends. Uncoolection.

I've had to stop going to the nearest grocery store that seems to play Shania Twain's 'Forever and For Always' whenever I'm there. It's hard to shop for frozen entrees through cold-air blasted tears. Feels good on a flushed face though.

I'm interested in direct communication about domestic life.

I mean, I wasn't fortunate enough to have ever experienced starting out with a band and sticking with them, so that would be interesting to me. People whose bands start out like that, when they break up it's always terrible.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

I imagine that I'm less famous than the 15th ranked bowler in the world.

Like they used to say about Joe Montana, he threw soft because he couldn't throw hard. He was successful because he didn't try to do what he couldn't. I couldn't rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try? That's why I've always worked harder on words.

If they told me I couldn't leave the radius of six miles from my house, I really wouldn't care. There's nowhere I really want to go.

I used to consider myself weak.

It must be very strange to live in the world of Willie Nelson or Bruce Springsteen or Pearl Jam. I don't know what kind of handle they have on their own loss of talent.

Pragmatism and romance are sort of opposites.

For the first 12 years of recording I would finish the album, then on the day it came out I'd never hear the songs again.

When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.

Little Wooster, Ohio and gargantuan Dallas, Texas formed the municipal cocktail of my life up till age 18. That drab, weird little town and the glitzy big one shaped me for sure.

The rules changed for art around 1989. We were all loosed upon the canon to clip and paste and borrow and update. Only thing is, unless you were in New York or in a cultural studies program, that new paradigm probably wasn't going to sink in until the Internet arrived.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

I'm not convinced I have fans.

My great grandfather was the last practicing Jew in my family. He died in 1982.

I guess on all Silver Jews records, it's extremely male-centric.

I am not only neither Christian nor Jewish, but said to be in between, and I feel the same way about being from the South and being from the North. I write with my left hand but I throw a ball with my right hand.

My father is a despicable man.

When you can't see you become very timid about space and moving. You become less aggressive and less tenacious. Lots of things that shouldn't be affected by vision really are. And you don't even know what they are until they become unstuck.

All my songs were made at the end of the neck, 'farmer's corner' chords.