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If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

I was determined to carve out a music of my own. I didn't want to copy anybody.

Back when we were first making records, you didn't just make the music, you put a great deal of energy into the way it looked, and every word that was written on the whole thing.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.

I'll be honest. We copied everyone... the Beatles, the Bachelors. It was the only way people would even listen to you.

I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

Think of a musical as a string of pearls. If you don't have a string, you can't put the pearls around your neck.

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.