Every summer, around late July and into August, I find myself in Europe, performing at any festival that will have me.

If I'm in L.A. for longer than 20 days, I'm looking for work, because I don't do vacations.

I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories.

I'm not exactly ambitious as much as I have a very good realization of what I am and what I am capable of.

Music to me is mankind's greatest possible achievement because look at all the good it does.

I'm not a very good writer. I'm working at it.

I don't cuss in songs. It's too easy.

As a young person, I was on the road playing music, so I was getting new environments shoved in my face whether I wanted them or not.

Anything in this culture that stands still long enough eventually becomes okay if a person can derive an income from it. Eventually, pay-per-view public execution will happen, and it will be half-time entertainment.

I would like go to Palestine and interview people there about what their lives are like; same thing in Iran.

Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, 'We're done.' After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, 'Now I'm going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.' Rather than play it safe, he went on.

Rarely do I do film press because I'm so low on the food chain of the movie, and for me it's just this thing I did for four weeks before the next tour started.

I find it takes a lot of strength to endure myself.

I think Naomi Klein was very astute with her book 'Shock Doctrine.' We make money on disaster.

I try to be well informed. I don't know how well I do all the time, but I try nonetheless.

The idea that any performer type is owed anything is a joke to me.

I still have dreams about CBGB's. I still miss the place.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

I'm not in a position where I get to pick and choose roles. I usually go on auditions in long lines and embarrass myself in front of casting directors, and with a lump in my throat and my ears burning, I walk past reception and smirking actors as I go to the parking garage and go back on the highway.

I'm terrified of motorcycles. I've been on one a couple of times. I did not like it.

Even though I am not hungry when I get up, I try to eat to get me ready for the day. Within an hour of getting up.

I'd love to talk to Janeane Garafalo or Randi Rhodes or Stephanie Miller from Air America. I'm an Air American junkie; I listen to them every day.

I thought I was gonna be in the minimum-wage working world all my life.

I'm disappointed by bands left and right, every day.

I get along with Australians really well. Everyone's usually really cool, and it's always a drag to leave.

The Bad Seeds are a band I will travel a great distance to see whenever possible.

It's easy for me to play bad guys because it's a very linear acting. Bad guys aren't empathetic. Being a bad guy is great because you're not friendly and you don't have to do much with your face.

I contribute a large amount of money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, so I'm on their mailing list for all their Klan Watch newsletters. I'm very well aware of White Power movements in America.

Chris Christie is New Jersey's concern, not America's.

I have had a number of less-than-enviable moments in my life when dealing with other people. I won't attempt to blunt that by saying I am not the only one.

I am afforded a bit of easy wonderment in relative comfort as to how humans have lasted so long. Climate- and geography-wise, the planet seems to have little use for us.

My first visit to West Berlin was in February 1983. The drive through East Berlin, the fact that West Berlin was surrounded by a wall that was more than 100 miles long - the absurdity and intensity of it really knocked me out.

It is very difficult to tell Americans that they can't do something.

Castle Face Records, run by The Oh Sees main man, Johnny Dwyer is always worth checking in with.

Mr. Christ, I read you as an infinitely patient entity who, as they say, often works in mysterious ways, a rebel unafraid to take the tougher, less traveled paths. Seems to me you're playing the long game. Is that why more states are coming out in favor of marriage equality? Is that why the Affordable Care Act is now with us?

Unsurprisingly, Nelson Mandela had and still has many detractors.

Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

When you have to work with and exist amongst cynical, burned-out personnel on a set, it doesn't matter what you're shooting or how much you're being paid - it's not worth it.

Canadians are often a friendly bunch.

For the last 30-plus years, I have been doing one long, uninterrupted improv.

Have you ever heard the expression 'one hot mess?' I think the term was custom-made for the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford.

Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.

It's not lost on me that everyone dies, but some people have a kind of immortality about them, and you can't imagine that they will ever be gone.

In the late summer of 1986, the band I had been in for five years stopped playing. Suddenly, I was on my own. This new state of bandlessness was, at first, traumatic. When your group breaks up, a lot of broken parts hit the ground.

If you want to go the scorched-earth, Obamacare-is-like-slavery route and choose to stay uninsured, you will have the Palinesque guts, the Cruzian fortitude to wave off the ambulance that will appear to scoop you up should something bad happen to you, right?

To get a human through a life, lives of broken bones, knock-me-over-with-a-feather susceptibility to myriad viruses, and whatever else might befall someone will cost money.

It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.

I don't need to have my convictions confirmed by a show of numbers. However, being among people in front of a band leads me to believe that all is not lost, that humans, now and then, can communicate on a higher level than the political and the practical.

Please don't think that I am one of those squishy types who can't handle reality. I have plenty of real-world things to deal with all the time. I have deadlines, meetings, I answer the phone, I get turned down, I wait in lines and am forced to pass for normal all the time.

While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline.