"My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to."

"After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz."

"I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else."

"Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics."

"By then I was in Brooklyn and drank my way through that summer. I stopped when I got sick of that and got a job at the Strand bookstore, which was a little better than the tax job."

"By many peoples' standards, my playing is very primitive but by punk standards, I'm a virtuoso."

"I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting."

"I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience."

"Even by the time I was four or five, I had Gene Autry records."

"I saw Suicide in '74 and it was pretty horrifying."

"From '69 til '76, I never played in public. I would play by myself at home."

"I quit the tax job then and decided that I was going to play in a band. I answered ads in the Village Voice and went through two days of auditioning for bands."

"Meanwhile after failing the bar twice, I knew some people in New York and moved here in August '71."

"The Stones were nasty and ugly and doing songs I was familiar with."