"If you listen to the first Saxon album, you can hear where the band was at that time, and what we were talking about earlier, with Free and Yes. That album is split three ways: the songs we wrote together that were fast and aggressive; then the more proggy tracks, longer and more musical; then blues riffs. So if you listen that album you can see there were three things that could have happened - we could have been like Free or like Yes, or we could play a new, aggressive kind of music, singing about motorcycles, and those were the songs we wrote together. If you listen to that album you could see where our influences came from, and how it all came together to create ‘Wheels Of Steel’. If you listen to ‘Backs To The Wall’, that is where I was coming from – try to get away from where you're supposed to be and drag yourself out of that to become a musician. ‘Stallions of the Highway’ is maybe the forerunner of ‘Motorcycle Man’ and the songs that Metallica and Megadeth took from and then invented a new kind of music"

"When I was a kid, my step-dad, who raised me, used to buy me books as Christmas gifts. He was an intellectual from another era, and believed that some kind of moral salvation lay in a combination of books, public education, and paying as much taxes as you could. When I was in sixth grade, he bought me the trilogy of children’s books by E.B. White, which included Trumpet of the Swan, Charlotte’s Web, and Stuart Little. The same year, I got a satin comforter from my mom, and I remember lying in my antique brass bed, propped up on those luxurious new pillows, and going on the wild rides of these stories; it seems like I didn’t leave my bed until I’d finished all three. I’d always liked to read, but it was the experience of binging on those three children’s books that really showed me what reading did to me, and for me—the way reading made me feel calm and inspired before I knew what those words meant—and that I was, in my heart, a reader, which really, then, was the beginning of it all, since writers are just readers who need a job."

"If we now want to get into films that — I arrogantly didn’t ask you if you would know anything about them; I just assumed, and assumption is the mother of all f—ups. Me, I’m Asian. I was raised in Asia and, to be honest with you, my favorite films of all time are really [Akira] Kurosawa films. He was a friend of mine. Yojimbo, Akahige meaning “Red Beard,” [and] Shichinin no samurai meaning “Seven Samurai,” I would say those are probably my three favorite films of all time. Even though Shichinin no samurai is the more famous one, I would probably pick Red Beard and Yojimbo.Red Beard is one of the most important movies in my life because it’s… I don’t want to say a movie about me, but it’s a movie about someone I tried to emulate subconsciously — or accidentally I should say — in that I am a martial artist, I am a healer, and I am a warrior, and those are the three kind of components that really make up Toshirô [Mifune]’s kind of character, you know? So I particularly relate to that movie on a very deep level."