Pete Townshend:

Do rock and pop mean different things to you know than they did at the time of the last Who album 24 years ago? If so, what has changed?

It is still the same, amazingly. It is music with a clear function. But so was the music that came before the late 50s. My father’s swing music was meant to soothe and encourage optimism and the possibility of postwar romance. My music is meant to confront trouble and pain, and through union and sharing (congregation) allow us to “dance” to a solution. I feel my music would be less valuable if there was a real world war. We would need different music then, maybe more like the music my father used to play.

David Lynch:

You know, there was a time when they said painting was dead. Painting ain’t never gonna be dead. No medium is gonna be dead! Infinite possibilities, always surprises coming along. There are not that many surprises in a formula, an arc. Some solid entertainment, nothing wrong with it. But there’s room for much, much more. And let’s not miss out on the much more.

Neil Gaiman:

I was very uncomfortable with the way that some people, particularly journalists who like very, very simple stories, were starting to view my move from comics to films to best-selling novels… it was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it’s an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me—at least in their heads—back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven’t just started to walk upright or left the water. Actually I don’t think it’s any kind of progression. It’s just a different kind of story told in a different kind of way.