"We are indeed amusing ourselves to death. This started when Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium was the message. I said right away that the message was the medium. But, alas, my voice was maybe not loud enough, and/or the medium without a serious message is much more amusing to people. So the entertainers became the gods of the people, who screamed: “Keep entertaining us! We want to die being entertained!” The kings of the world wished the same, and they let their countries fall while they were entertained. This is the only book in this list that was published way back in the 1960s. I hope you can get it."

"“Is there a better, cleaner, more streamlined, and quintessentially American tale? The scope and scale of Gatsby’s world draws me back again and again. I plant my flag in the hard soil of enduring and impossible love. The American Dream is a form of impossible love, is it not? You grasp at it, you claw your way toward it, you compromise yourself to ascend the steps of the temple, but the treasure inside is made of nothing—a silvery thread of faith, thought, and hope. Seize it and it will disintegrate in your palm. Gatsby is the most vivid and surprising romantic figurehead of our modern age: proof that the wanting IS the having. Fin.”"

"It’s such an amazing record. I love Copenhagen on there, it just melts me. Though I said it’s hard to pinpoint influences, maybe at the end of Weird Dreams, the final track on my new album, I was doing my Scott Walker impression a bit. It’s an album I always come back to because of the mood. It’s light and dark: there’s beauty there, but the lyrics give it a real edge. You can get different things out of it. I hope I do that with my music in that it’s able to make you feel good, but if you really want to get into it you can relate to the darkness. I’m always looking for that balance."