In Israel, there's a lot to learn from anyone, because to live there you've got to deal with the truth. Things happen real fast. Your day goes from cool to catastrophic in one second. Israelis know that the cafe you're in could blow up, or the shopping mall, and they rock that.

Where there is young people and vitality, you're going to find punk rock.

Will punk rock ever die? Pal, if you have to ask it's dead to you.

Rock is ironic in that, up to a certain point, you can get better and better at it if you don't mind possibly looking more and more ridiculous.

The Ruts were a great punk rock band from England whose songs were as excellent as their time together was short.

Punk-rock gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power.

Dinosaur Jr. in their live capacity are a band that put me in a state of such overwhelming rock that it often takes quite a while to come down.