Whenever any great song or album gets lost in the ether, someone is deprived of the joy of hearing it, and the great effort of those who created and recorded the work is damaged.

Nelson Mandela will always be the face of South Africa. The traveler passing through the country will see Mandela's face almost everywhere he looks. Truly, the man is omnipresent.

In the city of Pyongyang, you don't have to look very far to see an image of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung. They love the guy. He is responsible for the wonder that is North Korea.

I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.

I was raised in Washington, DC, very violent place. I grew up with violence. My introduction to music was violent. The years I've spent on tours, some of that was extremely violent.

Seasonal change in Los Angeles is often a very subtle thing. It's not as if we finally stop having to shovel the snow out of our driveways and can put our parkas back in the closet.

It's hard to get along with people. As much as you try to like them and accept them as individuals, it becomes difficult because they keep getting out of line and wasting your time.

To see change in your own area code is very powerful. There's a little orphanage down the street from my company, and we donate $1 from the sale of each CD we sell to the orphanage.

If I were a doctor, I would prescribe that you addict yourself deeply and irrevocably to music and never, ever seek cure outside of more music. It really is the best drug available.

I think we are in fact, losing free speech. We don't seem to care though. Many of us don't seem to notice. We will have to do a lot of work to bring back the American way to America.

When a band becomes as truly iconic as the Velvet Underground, there will often be a box set released, overburdened with mediocre material that dilutes what was fine left on its own.

Bono actually gets a lot of substantial work done. The guy really does put a lot of things together and, while I'm not a fan of his music, I greatly applaud his humanitarian efforts.

While I have not ruled out the possibility of doing music, what I don't want to do is go onstage and perform old songs. I do, all the time, but I don't think it is artistically brave.

Trying to write music, be in a band and keep it all happening is one of the hardest, morale-destroying, heartbreaking things you will ever try to do - and that's when it's going well.

If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession. [...] You have to go at it single-mindedly and let nothing get in your way.

Every politician, every president gets votes by getting people that don't like him to like him. That's why politicians are slippery: because they talk out of both sides of their mouth.

If you listen to the way I speak and watch the way I conduct myself - there's nothing about me that's rock n' roll. It's like, 'Hello, I'm in a rock n' roll band'. 'No, you're a narc.'

perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch.

I just get things done instead of talking about getting them done. I don't go out and party. I don't smoke, drink or do drugs and I'm not married, that leaves a lot of time for my work.

I've enjoyed, to a certain extent, any country I've been in, of course like Serbia and Croatia can be very restrictive and oppressive, and frustrating, but they're still very beautiful.

I always took quite seriously the things that Chuck D. of Public Enemy had to say. He's always been someone I've learned quite a bit from and someone I pay a great deal of attention to.

I think to write fiction, this is just how I see it, you have to have a powerful need/desire to connect. I can't. Wanting to and not being able to has lead to a lot of misery in my life.

In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

I have always identified with Joan Didion's depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California, ever since reading 'Play It As It Lays,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album.'

What I'm saying is America has a job deficit because hundreds of thousands of jobs went elsewhere. Not because [Barack] Obama raised your taxes. He, in fact, lowered them. They are lower.

I don't try to be angry to prove something. I wouldn't try to intimidate you for any reason unless you were trying to intimidate me, and then I would show you that you can't do that to me.

I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.

Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.

I urge you to read the Occupy Manifesto, written by the New York City General Assembly. It is unavoidably clear. This is not directionless action. If it were, the media would have moved on.

If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record.

With writing, there are multiple drafts. On stage, there is one take. I do a lot of preparation for shows, so, for the most part, what you hear me say is pretty much what I wanted to get at.

I mean I appreciate fan mail and that the people like what I am doing but I can't answer it. If I would answer 25 letters a day I would be just a guy answering mail and not an artist anymore.

I'm not like paparazzi. I never force myself on anyone. I always ask, and some places offer money. And so I try and get these photos to give you, the viewer, a real look at what I was seeing.

Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

Desperation is the secret to my steady employment. I am not interested in downtime. I really like to keep working all the time and I always feel like I'm in the mail room of life; working up.

For many years, I tried to make New Year's resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.

There's tons of junk food for your mind on the Internet. You can sit there for three or 10 or 20 hours a day getting in online arguments with other people who also choose to waste their time.

When I was a kid looking at pictures of the Sphynx, and the Pyramids, and different tribes in Africa, all of that stuck with me, and I always wanted to see those things and meet those people.

I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.

Horror jolts me when I look at one of you and see a pair of beautiful eyes that make me think your mind might contain a world that could hold me as the bolts shake loose and fly from my frame.

Nowadays, the media have to be there to keep you from asking too many questions, from getting together with other people who might want to do the Jeffersonian thing and call out the government.

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

I have never experienced anything like walking out onto the stage of an oversold venue and, before the first note is struck, realizing that there is not going to be enough oxygen for all of us.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.

Of course same sex marriage is constitutional! The right to be yourself, to pursue life, liberty, and property, is protected several ways over several amendments. John Boehner should know this.

The world’s a better place since I chose music. I like the physical aspect of it, the volume and the intensity of it. It’s loud and hard. I like all that because inside me I feel like screaming.

I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions.

When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can't get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he's either lying or not all that bright.

I have a lot of compact discs. I need them for radio play and convenience. Many bands and artists I am a fan of don't always release their work on vinyl, so I take what they feel like giving me.

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