Post-BEA Reading Material Glut

"If I were free to choose from everybody alive, just snap my fingers and say come here you, I wouldn't pick Jose. Nehru, he's nearer the mark. Wendell Willkie. I'd settle for Garbo any day. Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or--listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o' War, I'd respect your feeling. No, I'm serious. Love should be allowed. I'm all for it. Now that I've got a pretty good idea what it is." --Breakfast at Tiffany's

"I had this whole history with [David] Byrne. In New York, I used to get mistaken for him all the time....Then at some point I saw 'Burning Down the House' and I remember something in me just twitched when I saw Byrne because he was this fully realized version of myself. We're both these uptight white guys trying to stumble into grace....
"You know, there are two kinds of singers: those who sing about who they are, like Townes Van Zandt, and those who sing about who they wish they are, like me. But I'll tell you, what happens sometimes is that, incrementally, you become that person you're singing about. What people see in my songs is me in my deep-focus mode. That's when I get to tear away the veil of my anxiety. If I'm holding out for anything, I guess, it's that: to become the 'me' in my songs." --Jim White, interviewed in The Believer, May 2006

"Even the pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject. They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than it is!" --Bill Janovitz, Exile on Main Street, excerpted in the 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 1 sampler