Everyone wants to be safe. Well, I got news for you: You can't be safe. Life's not safe. Your work isn't safe. When you leave the house, it isn't safe. The air you breathe isn't going to be safe, not for very long. That's why you have to enjoy the moment.

Good manners don't cost nothing.

The Strokes will never get anywhere after that first record.

We always operated within a sense of community not just about the band. It's important to the way we define ourselves. It's the entire world in which we operate.

I absolutely love Las Vegas. I've been there a bunch of times on my own.

We got our first significant pieces of press in the 'New York Rocker' from early gigs at CBGB.

One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.

Sonic Youth has always been the vehicle for my writing, you know, because it's a collective songwriting entity: we write our songs as a group.

To some degree, I consider myself a writer, and so I have a strong relationship with literature.

You don't work in isolation anymore. Anybody can write a song and put it up on the Internet the next day.

New York always has a lot of creativity going on.

I always think that, for me, being someone who comes out of electric guitar experimentation, the idea of playing acoustic guitar is, in itself, kind of a radical move.

I have nothing against change or evolution, and I'm not one of those people who wants the city to be what it was 40 years ago or whatever, because that's not what New York is, really.

I've been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that's definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.

In the week following Sandy, we weren't flooded, but we were without everything else - I ended up living by candlelight - no phones, no computers, no light, no power. If we took a walk at night to go and find something to eat, it was completely black, with no lights coming out of the windows, no street lights: a very apocalyptic feeling.

I've always played acoustically - it's how I learned. I grew up listening to Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dylan and what have you.

Sonic Youth could never really get it together acoustically - quite frankly, it wasn't something we were really that interested in.

During the whole time in Sonic Youth, I was happy to put my energy into that. It would have been very difficult to do a solo project.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

I'd rather have vinyl and a download code than a CD any day.

One thing I always hated with CDs is when people started putting 65 to 75 minutes on their albums.

Probably the most fun thing we do in our lives is getting up on stage.

We find that the more you talk about it, the more you head off any spontaneous inspiration that might happen.

As far as we're concerned, we're always Sonic Youth, and we're always making a Sonic Youth record. We just see it so much more as a continuum than a periodic thing. We're just in the studio making the next record, and we don't relate it to anything other than what's going on at the moment.