Why do you judge me as a musician, John? All I'm interested in is making money.
Money isn't important, but you have to have enough, so you don't have to think about it. Thinking about money is a drag.
You can't make money on advertising; you just have to seed the clouds. What you're after is word of mouth.
Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power.
I think of religion as something that stains the person. It's a mindset you can never get free from, it's always in the back of your head.
What makes a comedian has nothing to do with religion. Think of Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, Jackie Gleason, who were all Catholics.
I believe that religion should be totally separated from the state. That's not the way it is today, not even in Sweden.
Religion, in any form, is always interesting to me because of how powerful it is. Not even the religion itself, but to the people that follow it... The effect that it has had on people's minds.
I've never had any religion. I'd prefer it if I did, really. Even as a boy I just couldn't make myself believe.
I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.
I increasingly see organized religion as actually my enemy. They treat me as their enemy. Not all Christians, of course. Not all Jews, not all Muslims.
I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.
Some people are that - more than a parent, more than a role model, more than anything less than a religion.
I think religion is a bunch of hooey, and I think that the holidays are an opportunity for people to get stressed out, getting their rush to shop. It's so conformist.
I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.
I just hate one-dimensional portrayals of religion; it's too cheap and easy to do, and ignores the nuances that go into having a belief system.
With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.
I'm not normally a jewelry person. I'm supposed to be a working class champion and all, and I don't like to rub my success in people's faces.
The way you can be careful of the catastrophe that success can bring is by paying attention to something else that comes along with success - responsibility.
It's society that disables an individual by not investing in enough creativity to allow for someone to show us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable.
Ironing boards are a classic example of something I find horrible about modern society: the excitementation, for want of a better word, of mundane things.
