My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.

I remember my father, who was 'somebody' in the synagogue, bringing home with him one of the poor men who waited outside to be chosen to share the Passover meal. These patriarchal manners I remember well, although there was about them an air of bourgeois benevolence which was somewhat comic.

Fine arts education in public schools is really abysmal. The same emphasis should be put on music, theater, dance - anything creative - that's put on math and science.

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

Success and the art of making music are two different things for me.

The new generation of musicians is writing music on computers, and this is very sad because the quality of songwriting has crashed and dived. There are some songs out that are made by only one guy who works a computer and doesn't play any instruments.