"Neil Young rescued me from my high school years, because it's such a lonely album. At first I was a total loner and I never went out on the weekend, and so that song about the weekend ['Out On The Weekend'], I think it says, "pack it up, buy a pick up", and it was perfect, because I wanted to get out of my little suburban town and go to a city - a better place to be alone, than being with a bunch of people! 'Heart Of Gold', obviously, 'Harvest', and I like his use of the lap steel, it's got this lonely feel to it. The lonely high school years - I understood I'm not the only lonely guy out there!"

"On my eighth birthday my mother gave me a hardcover copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The inscription read: ‘Here is the brother you said you wanted.’ I was having trouble in school—particularly reading—and a psychologist had recently tested me and informed my mother and the school that I was, in the parlance of the day, ‘retarded.’ My mother steadfastly refused to accept this, saying, ‘You just haven’t found anything you care enough about to read.’ It turned out I was dyslexic and perhaps mildly autistic. It took me months, and when I was done, I could read, and I had indeed been given a brother—two, in fact, and I have visited with them every year since my eighth birthday."