I've never raped or killed anybody, or hurt a kid. I've done all the more inept, high-volume stuff - like, "Whoops, sorry I came in your hair. Don't worry, I won't use your name when I tell this story on stage."
It's hard for me to sympathize with a young person who chooses to go into the military because they know where they're going. I think we need to start depopulating the military.
If you are a kid in Beverly Hills, (I am not putting down people who live in Beverly Hills) if that kid knows private school and a credit card... you can't say the kid is taking life for granted. He is taking the life that was given to him.
We Americans look funny when we're in France because we don't travel, we are fairly un-cultured whereas Europeans go to Africa all the time because it's right there.
We're just very belligerent, and I'm not trying to put Americans down, by and large I think we're nice people, but we operate with the information we're given and we are limited by the ignorance that is kind of injected into the media and into the TV shows.
Punk-rock gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.
I remain hopeful that science, innovation and kindness will come to the fore as things become more and more tense in parts of the world. I think what you are seeing in the world right now is kind of a leveling or an attempt to level the playing field.
If you watch a stretch of TV for a few hours, there is a good chance you'll hear me on some commercial or in some documentary or on a cartoon as some voice of a character.
I am basically working 7 days a week. When I am not eating, sleeping, or working out, I am working on one of projects which I am just damned determined to finish.
If the truth is told how I want to be remembered... as someone who cared. Someone who worked really hard and someone who didn't sit around.
There are things that happen so quickly. A better cameraman can capture them, but if the light is not bright and you hoist up your camera by the time you've dialed in your settings. There are eye blink moments where you're like "Aaahhhh, I wish," but those are too many to catalogue. Nothing really sticks out.
I'm usually busy - if you call me at the house, I get about four phone calls there a year - I'm usually running around the house with a pen in my mouth holding onto something, folding it, or doing something to it, and it's always a bad time.
I'm not a conservative or a republican but I know that there's conservative republicans who I probably vigorously disagree with but I also am smart enough, or something enough, to understand that they really think that they're right, and they're looking at me like I'm crazy.
The most interesting place by far was Afghanistan. Just because it is a place that I cannot see myself living. The hardness of the people and the history of the country is just so completely intense.
I would like to get out to the region in the Caspian sea. I would like to go there. I would like to get to Darfur. I would like to get to Khartoum in Northern Sudan. I would like to get to Zimbabwe. I would like to go back to North Korea, if I could. I would like to go to Yemen. I would like to get to Kashmir. Most of those destinations I will get to.
I've never killed anybody... but I've definitely thought about it. But that's how we are. That's what happens when you put people together and put them into societies and cultures and have laws and the idea of justice.
To justify being listened to, I try to be as well informed as I can. Hence, the travel. Reading is good too. Reading gets you part way there, and I do read pretty voraciously for a guy who's trying to write so much.
I am very ambitious in a way, in that I'm not trying to be the richest guy or whatever. I just really like my work.
The visceral nature of hard rock music, the fact that you can have this sledge hammering sound - and that you can hook a lyric up and a feeling up to something and make the lyric jump into this machine that crushes. That has always been really attractive to me, that kind of power.
We are occupants. No one has any lasting purchase on life or on the planet.
I just work, to the exclusion of most other things. I rarely work in a frenzied manner, just kind of - if you take the beater that whips the icing or the eggs into shape - on the upper end of medium speed, that's kind of how I am about seven days a week.
We occupy the planet with a vengeance. We seek to dominate it.
There's no retirement, there's just a few years of non-work by the fire with someone bringing you some tea and relative peace and playing with the grandchildren.
I do think that Americans are poorly served by their media, at times extremely poorly served by their elected officials who are non responsive to majority feelings and cut off to a certain degree from the affairs of the world.
I am a white guy in America with an education, albeit high school, but a pretty good one. Another guy from a different demographic or different ethnicity in America can look at me and say, "You take a lot for granted." Well... okay. I just live in a white male American reality, where I hear you but I don't know if I necessarily read you.
