My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs.
When I was 15, I got super into Eric Clapton. My father took notice of this and got me a guitar for Christmas.
I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, you should read To Kill a Mockingbird.'
I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader.
Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'
If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.
The truth is, this being errand boy to one hundred and fifty thousand people tires me so by night I am ready for bed instead of soirees.
For folks in Washington to believe that they are smart enough to pick the next energy technology is, in my judgment, the height of arrogance. For me or any of my peers to pick energy-technology X as the solution to solving America's energy problems is just a fool's errand.
I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.
Due to my sometimes erratic behavior, my children tried very hard to avoid me and not do anything to set me off.
Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don't think the press has understood me.
If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.
I'm not an intellectual in any sense, I have constraints of erudition. I'm not able to deal with things outside my ken, and that makes me irritable. I'm irritable about the fact that I never went to university.
However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.
Van Halen was a huge influence on me, and 'Eruption' was the song that really leaped off that first Van Halen album.
The thing that struck me most about the Mount St. Helens project was not the devastation of the eruption, but the logging industry - the earth transformed on that scale by humans.
I left New York after my mother died and, rather aimlessly, had settled in Istanbul for a change of scene. It was a rather dramatic gesture on my part, since I'd lived in New York for 20 years, but I felt I needed something different - the escalating expense and pressure of New York had begun to weary me.
I like the concept of escalating warfare, but you need someone to fight back in order for things to escalate. If there's no confrontation or argument going on, it's too dull for me. I think that's the nature of the prankster: Things are too quiet. What can I do?
I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.
Long before Donald Trump came down the escalator, Kanye West was public enemy No. 1 for simply trying to tell the truth to people about things that were going on, so I'm unsurprised that he supports me and my ideas and me just thinking freely.
