"I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills."

"I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car."

"I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it."

"I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else."

"I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part."

"Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle."

"So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame."

"It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?"

"I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition."

"Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?"

"There's more good music being made now than ever before."

"It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas."

"We live in ugly times."

"Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively."

"People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper."

"I've got "nothing "to say most of the time."

"There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior."

"Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce."

"Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule."

"Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop."

"Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market."

"Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace."

"The city is a body and a mind - a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information."

"Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context."

"I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be."

"I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff."

"I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same."

"I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary."

"I'm guarded; I don't talk much."

"It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music."

"The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove."

"When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another."

"I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election."

"I've never had writer's block."

"We tend to mistake music for the physical object."

"There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop."

"I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible."

"Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law."

"The making of music is profoundly affected by the market."

"I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while."

"I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing."

"I've noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I'm not talking about getting a table in a restaurant."

"Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community."

"I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it's a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff."

"I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car."

"The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time."

"I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert."

"Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes."

"When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do."

"I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That's how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context."