I was a very scared child. Not, you know, not so much of life but of the demons that lurked in the dark. And horror movies terrified me. You know, I'd love watching them but then at night, I would just be up in sweats all night.

I define 'social thriller' as thriller/horror movies where the ultimate villain is society.

Musicians own music because music owns them.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

Let your mind alone, and see what happens.

I said to my friends that if I was going to starve, I might as well starve where the food is good.

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

My big ears indicated a talent for music. This thrilled me.

Nature was my kindergarten.

Life is like a trumpet - if you don't put anything into it, you don't get anything out of it.

Music's not like becoming a doctor, who can walk into a community and find people who need him.

A person should design the way he makes a living around how he wishes to make a life.

I was quite keen on silviculture, the growing of trees, and that was something I gave a lot of thought to. Maybe I could've gone in that direction. But it just so happened that while I was trying to make up my mind, I enrolled in art school, and there I began to develop my interest in music, parallel with my interest in the visual arts.

I kept on buying records and listening to them. Finally, I was able to hear the relationship between the jazz improvisers' solos and the underlying structure that it's based on, the chord progression. That was pretty easy to do in the swing era, y'know, when jazz was, like, pop music, you know. It had made the charts and everything like that.

When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.

You can find heroism everyday, like guys working terrible jobs because they've got to support their families. Or as far as humor, the things I see on the job, on the street, are far funnier than anything you'll ever see on TV.

You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?

Secretly, I wanted to look like Jimi Hendrix, but I could never quite pull it off.

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.

Absolute 80's is three hours of mainstream 80's music. I also do New Wave Nation that is more cutting edge. It is more punk stuff from the 70's to the 90's.

If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

There's nothing like a good cheating song to make me want to run home to be with my wife.

I did nothing to deserve God's love; in fact, I was living as an orphan, without hope. Yet God chose to pursue a relationship with me, and through the death of his son Jesus, I was adopted into God's family.

As Christians, our compassion is simply a response to the love that God has already shown us.

A scene gets cut a few frames here and there, but there's a cumulative effect to it, and then the music needs to be reworked. It's demanding, but when you see the improved cuts, it's always better.

Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music.

If I can only be known as one thing, then, well, I guess it would be poet and performer and teacher.

San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.

All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.

Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.

Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.

I gave my voice to poetry.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry.

My mother was a washerwoman - or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plano, Texas - who always loved poetry and always loved stories.

A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your fingers across a screen. I like both. I like to work on sketchbooks, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to put different media on it. Then there's the phone, smartphone, iPad: It's the new page, and it's not the same page anymore.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth.

When you take a shower in space, you have to press the water onto your body to clean yourself, and then you gotta vacuum it off.

I don't see this planet being... they're talking about how they're turning around the environmental problems here, but I think it's already too late.

My life has been a roller coaster ride, but somehow I've always been able to land on my feet and still play the guitar.

Being a superstar... can make life very difficult, difficult to grow. So I like to visit with my friends, listen to some fine music, drink some good wine, perhaps take a ride in the country in a fine car, or... just walk along the beach.

There's a certain time that when somebody asks you a question, you answer them. I don't think I said anything with venom. If you can express yourself without anger and make it as palatable as you can, that's what you do.

Fans don't boo nobodies.

I work for ABC television; I have my own syndicated TV series. I've been on the cover of 'Time Magazine' and on the cover of 'Sports Illustrated' five times.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.

My music, my songs are 100 percent inspired by girl power.

I wake up in the morning, I do a little stretching exercises, pick up the horn and play.