“After all, what is lyric but the seamless fusion of formal control and passionate conviction, in the service of the expression of personal experience?”

“Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pullback the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatnessof this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewnacross the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist—mysoul purpose.”

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

“The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.”

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“Tattoos, after all, are a passionate, usually doomed assertion of mastery of your own destiny, or at least a defiant embrace of one that you cannot control.”