The true work of love resides in sticking with the process, especially in those moments, and eras, when desire is forced to coexist with doubt.

Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This.

One of the reasons I hate Hollywood so much is that they portray the travails of teen life as so innocuous and fun loving, some kind of idyll before the mean business of adulthood. People forget how much it all hurts back then. Someone pinches you and you feel it in your bones. They don’t want to face what a bunch of fragile sadists teenagers were. All these folks who acted all shocked and outraged when those kids in Columbine went off – where the hell did they go to high school?

If you’re wondering if you’re a collector, ask yourself two questions. Do I own too many records? Do my friends and family feel I own too many records? If your respective answers are No and Yes, you’re a Collector.

Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I.

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don’t work out, when you’re licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

The reason Americans favor milk chocolate over dark is because Milton Hershey got his bars into enough American mouths to establish our collective taste.

Isn’t there something you want to tell me, something filthy and lovely and true.

Styx has become the mullet of bands.

More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.