If you're trying to deal with being a marginalized person and trying to confront a larger population that isn't the same as you, you can be friendly about it, and invite everybody in, or you can be angry about it and be hostile and attack the systems that you want to destabilize.

I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.

Listening to songs is like eating and writing songs is like vomiting. You're putting a ton of stuff in, it combines in unpredictable ways, and comes back out in a big mess.

I'm not an actor.

I've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.

Lou Reed was an ideal figure to me. He was bisexual, like me, and seemed to inhabit an ambiguous middle place on the masculine-feminine spectrum.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn't get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn't interested in having to follow.

I don't think I'll ever be able to fully explain the way that the Velvet Underground's records opened a door in my head. But it has something to do with Lou Reed as a mythic figure: a person who fitted no category, who defied limits and trends and definitions.

We music fans go to shows for transcendence; it's like being called to prayer.

Chuck Berry invented rock 'n' roll. He was one of the best songwriters of the 20th century.

People get stigmatised for their bodies and for their differences. Then those people become very vulnerable.

Ezra Furman And The Boy-Friends was a band with a specific mission - to be a really good rock'n'roll band. And we achieved it.

I want to make the greatest record ever made. It's the only thing I can think about.

I guess I just do being a man different than some.

You know, a lot of people have an instinct to downplay the fact that they are performing and be, like, 'There is no theatre here. This is just me playing the songs.' At some point I just realised how much better it could be if you weren't shy about being a performer.

It's a good feeling to not tell people what's going on.

There is something embarrassing about asking for money, but if I hadn't done that, I would have not continued to be a professional musician.

I've been writing songs since I was a teenager, so one kind of song I've written a lot is about, I don't know, teen angst feelings - feeling unsure of yourself and immature.

I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.

We punk fans have so much energy to give to the fight against injustice, i.e. the abuse of the poor by the rich, i.e. climate change.

A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.

You have to be an anti-racist to not be racist. Because it's just a cultural tide that will pull you into it if you're not swimming against it.

It's one of the guiding philosophies of my life - not fearing any authority on earth.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.