Whether the Virgin Mary existed, I don’t know. But the human need for her to appear in tortilla, that’s what inspires my interest.

I don’t know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.

I have no patience for anyone who thinks they’ve figured things out, no patience for people who think they’re right at the expense of everyone else. The world is too connected and too complicated to conform to any of our rigid ideas of what it should be like.

Shaving your head is acceptable. It’s when you start wearing toupees and brushing your hair over that things go wrong.

I stopped drinking and realised New York still has a lot of charm, but it has become so bourgeois and affluent – and I can’t really complain because I’m sort of bourgeois and affluent myself, but I like living in a place where artists and musicians and writers can actually pay the rent.

I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself when I’m writing. It feels like if I come up with something good, or I come up with something bad, I’m not too worried.

I read the New Testament, specifically the gospels and I was struck at their divinity, feeling that humans could not have figured this out on their own. We’re just not bright enough.

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be ‘eclectic.’

I’ve made records that everyone has hated and I’ve loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I’ve deemed, at best, mediocre.

So in 1987 I gave up all animal products and became a vegan. Simply so that I could eat and live in accordance with my beliefs that animals have their own lives, that they’re entitled to their own lives and that contributing to animal suffering is something that I don’t want to be a part of.