Once you hit 40, you start reexamining the math of it all. I'll trade wisdom for youth any day.
If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway.
The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone. It was the only way we could share music and it was also a way of advertising yourself. Selection, order, the lettering you used for the track list, how much technical detail you went into, whether or not you added artwork or offered only artwork and no track list at all, these choices were as codified as a Victorian bouquet.
We reveal something of our nature when we sing, something that can be disguised in our speaking voice.
The people who are slamming me have no idea about what it feels like to unjustly have a child killed in an insane war.
If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3. 8 billion years since the first bacteria. . . . After 3. 8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.
The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.
The cultures of the Americas were extremely complex and interesting, with their own languages and observatories to watch the stars. The more you know about them the more you realize how extremely impressive they were. Bloodthirsty, though, I think they were as well.