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" I have not practiced saxophone since 1980. I mean, not one note. I do not pick it up in my house, and that's the end of it. "

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" I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out. "

" I'm not striving for happiness, I'm trying to get some work done. And sometimes the best work is done under doubt. Constantly rethinking and re-evaluating what you're doing, working and working until it's finished. "

" I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading. "

" You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want! "

" No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you've got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds. "

" It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I'll kick this back in, I don't need to take this profit share. It's very cooperative. "

" I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. "

" I have about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work. "

" My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music. "

" I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together. "

" Each record in the 'Book of Angels' series is meant to be unique in terms of the compositions. "

" Music is about people for me. It's not about sounds. It's about people; it's about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities. "

" The magic that you find in surf music, I think, is really timeless. You know, when I was very young, I was in a surf band. Surf music is an instrumental music that still means a lot to me, not in an nostalgic way, but as something that really gets to the heart of the guitar itself. "

" Anything that gets in the way of my focus to create gets cut out of my life. It's not easy. Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's friends. Sometimes it's the ability to have a relationship. "

" I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing. "

" I don't play favorites with people. My basic philosophy is that the only way to make the world a better place is by bringing something beautiful to every single person you run into at every moment of the day, so how can you play favorites with somebody? "

" I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing. "

" And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage. "

" It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge. "

" Man, Dick Dale shreds. He's welcomed to anybody's bar mitzvah. "

" The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive. "

" Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like. "

" When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way. "

" I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages. "

" I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are. "

" What happens when you get to the age of 60 is that you have no more doubts. I know why I'm here on this planet. I know what I need to do. I know what is a distraction and what isn't. "

" As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don't support you any more. "

" One thing that I do ask myself when I'm in the creative process is, 'Does the world need this?' "

" I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.' "

" Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea. "