Quotes

When you have a little bit more sales and popularity, as Talking Heads did then, you could say, "Oh, can we have this kind of lighting or can we do a video on our day off?" And people would appear and make it happen. So I miss a little bit of that ease of getting things done but I don't miss arenas. That terrified me. When it got to a certain scale the audience became this abstract mass and you started to lose that connection. Other people can deal with that but I can't.

You knew that as Bush (George W. Bush) left the economy was in tatters and people were going to be out of jobs and out of homes. I thought, "People are going to be pissed off real soon and whatever's closest at hand they'll blame it." And, God forbid, they're not going to blame themselves for voting for George Bush and the guys whose policies got them into this mess. Poor Barack Obama is going to have to take the stick for everything that went before.

I feel like if you license a song to a television show or a film, people understand that the song is a quotation. With me they often pick some classic song that's representative of an era or a mood and it's an easy way for them to instantly push some buttons with an audience. But with an advert it's a little bit different because then people assume that you are endorsing whatever it is. And also it gets played over and over and over again and it really tends to cement the link. And you think, "Oh, that's the song from the Toyota commercial", as opposed to, "This is the song he wrote when his girlfriend died." I'm not ready for that!

Despite having toured with her [St. Vincent] for almost a year I don't think I know her much better, at least not on a personal level ... mystery is not a bad thing for a beautiful, talented young woman (or man) to embrace. And she does it without seeming to be standoffish or distant.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.