Dickinson Quotes

(On his friends who called him after the Oscar nomination): It was, well, the people that didn`t leave when I was dying of AIDS and then had a miraculous recovery. It was the people that have been around forever as friends. It was Angie Dickinson, it was Ann-Margret, Jon Voight, Charles Durning, a whole lot of people that aren`t in the industry who are very good friends and 500 stunt men, I work with their grandsons now. Then you realise how long you`ve been doing this.

I`d always wanted to make a record with Jim Dickinson, and I`d known about his boys for years, ... He reminded me that when they were 13 or 14 years old they had a punk rock band and I`d called him and wanted to make a record with them then.

Jim Dickinson is a musical shaman. He not only understands and knows music, he knows and understands the people who make it. It was kind of freaky sometimes, because he would seem to know what we were thinking musically before we played it, then he`d articulate it in a way that made more sense than how we envisioned it.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson`s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.