What I've learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you're hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.
With Los Angeles, it's kind of a love-hate thing. Sometimes I think it's marvelous, and sometimes I think it's a dump. It's so fake and I can't deal with how fake it is.
We used to have our own plane with the band's name on the side. It was a dream come true. You drive to a local airport. There's none of this checking in stuff; you just get on the plane.
I remember when I was in my late teens just getting rid of lots of records, realizing I only ever listened to them when I was reading, or watching TV, or doing something else.
I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers.
One thing that changed when I moved upstate was that I became interested in different materials. I started making the stone benches because I was seeing rocks.
I wanted to support things that are helpful to people and maybe bash what I think is dangerous. So I switched from being everybody to being myself.
I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.
Some acts are tricky. Eartha Kitt was tricky in a wonderful, old-style way. She did yoga on the piano and put her hands over her ears when the other acts were on.
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition." (Said to Leopold Mozart)
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.
IT'S NO FUN WATCHING PEOPLE WOUND THEMSELVES SO THAT THEY CAN HOLE UP, NURSE THEMSELVES BACK TO HEALTH, AND REPEAT THE CYCLE. THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO.
MORE THAN ONCE I'VE AWAKENED WITH TEARS RUNNING DOWN MY CHEEKS. I HAVE HAD TO THINK WHETHER I WAS CRYING OR WHETHER IT IS INVOLUNTARY, LIKE DROOLING.
I remember wearing overcoats, hiding in the bushes outside of Abbey Road Studios, waiting for the traffic to clear. As it did, we would drop our overcoats and run out on to the cross walk and strike our poses.
You know, Equal Interest played at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival Awards and not one musician from that category was even thought of. Even thought of! The idea, that here's this vital energy, and that element doesn't even know it exists!
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.
Five years ago, people were crying and feeling the Japanese were about to take over the Earth. I don't hear that kind of talk anymore.
I only have one idea, that is WhatsApp, and I am going to continue to focus on that. I have no plans to build any other ideas.
I grew up in a country where I remember my parents not being able to have a conversation on the phone. The walls had ears, and you couldn't speak freely.
If you have an idea, you have to move on it, to make a gesture. Drawing is an immediate way of articulating that idea - of making a gesture that is both physical and intellectual.
