"The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows."

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."

"I searched for years I found no love. I'm sure that love will never be a product of plasticity."

"Without deviation progress is not possible."

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."

"No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to."

"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced."

"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."

"I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird."

"Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence."

"One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds."

"Politics is the entertainment branch of industry."

"Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass."

"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."

"A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians."

"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

"Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read."

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it."

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."

"If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library."

"You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream."

"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."

"Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something."

"Music is always a commentary on society."