"I reread this book every couple of years. I’m still trying to understand why it has me so completely in its thrall. It’s a mystery, wrapped in a dream. No wonder all attempts to film, dramatize or musicalize it have missed. These are not “real” people. They are ghosts of the American dream who continue to haunt us. Their laughter seems long ago but their sadness is contemporary."

"This book has the virtue of being the most perfect novel ever written. It manages to blend the miniature world of an uninteresting town with a profound reckoning with the human heart in all its vagaries. Here we find courage, pettiness, self-deception, love, profundity, triviality, sadness, joy, munificence, greed, theatricality, restraint, wit, pomposity, despair, hope. It’s seductively readable, free of pretension, and written with a rare clear-eyed kindness."

"The Use Your Illusions were quite overproduced. You could see why Izzy Stradlin had a problem with them. He wanted to do the 16-track thing, and Axl Rose was having none of it. It's quite an emotional song. Axl Rose clearly had mental issues, and Yesterdays is one of those songs that captures that sadness. Anyone with issues related to childhood problems or trauma can connect with that."

"That was a really good band for me growing up. Lots of my friends were into really heavy bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit. And I always used to find a lack of melody and musicality to those bands; they seemed all about aggression and there were no tunes to sing, and the lyrics were usually shit as well. And Deftones were really melodic, and that's rare. They would play in such an aggressive way and yet they had this mode that they always wrote in, so their songs always have a certain sadness to them no matter what they were doing. This record has this incredible sadness and extra power you could never get, no matter how loud you play it. The harmony has such a nostalgic wistfulness. The older you get, the more you get into the feeling and the emotion of it, whereas when you're young it's all about the excitement. The album hit the perfect sweet spot for me, where it gave me all the aggression I wanted from Nirvana, but these guys are extra heavy and they have this amazing sadness. I used to play the drums and would play exactly the sort of things Deftones were doing. I also think Chino Moreno's singing style, high and forceful, along with Thom Yorke, is where my voice comes from. I always try to emulate them. Moreno could sing hard but he could sing a melody that was high and above the dirge below, sailing out above the chaos below it"