Quotes from Walter Becker

I think the audience for Limp Bizkit is probably not going to be particularly interested in what we're doing. I don't think they'll find much that satisfies them in what we do.

I love guys like Charlie Parker.

The perfect day for me is waking up and having a cup of tea with my kids before I drive them to school; Then, I go into the studio and try and write some music for three or four hours and give up about noon.

It wouldn't bother me at all not to play on my own album.

When you're collaborating with somebody, there has to be a spirit of cooperation. There are a lot of times when you just can't persuade someone to write a certain type of song, either musically or lyrically.

I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.

I'm a self-taught musician aside from what I've been able to pick up from other players.

Some places you play in America, it's like 'On the Waterfront.'

'Gaucho' was a struggle for us for a lot of reasons, and in the end, we just sort of survived it.

We play rock & roll, but we swing when we play. We want that ongoing flow, that lightness, that forward rush of jazz.

That's sort of what we wanted to do: conquer from the margins, sort of find our place in the middle based on the fact that we were creatures of the margin and of alienation.

Cynicism, I contend, is the wailing of someone who believes that things are, or should be, or could be, much, much better than they are.

Most of the time when people say something sounds like Steely Dan, and I listen to it, it doesn't. And I'm not even sure what they're talking about.

With 'Aja,' there was a sort of happy conjunction between our tastes and the backgrounds and styles of studio musicians at the time.

I think that there's the self-imposed pressure to come up with something that's good. For guys like us, that's much more important than any external pressure could really be.

The protagonist in 'Deacon Blues' is a triple-L loser - an L-L-L Loser. It's not so much about a guy who achieves his dream but about a broken dream of a broken man living a broken life.

Originally, we had a band known as Steely Dan. As we moved away from the band, we got whoever was appropriate for specific tunes. In a lot of cases, we gravitated toward jazz players who had more sophisticated harmonic concepts.

It was the 'Gaucho' album that finished us off. We had pursued an idea beyond the point where it was practical. That album took about two years, and we were working on it all of that time - all these endless tracking sessions involving different musicians. It took forever, and it was a very painful process.

We have been fortunate enough to do something that has always been out of the mainstream and yet have an audience for what we do.

I think every time, before we do an album, we have a discussion where we sort of consider the idea of doing something radically different.

All our wives are experimental psychologists.

You have a kid, and it's like, 'He's gotta go to college! Gotta have some clothes!'

I don't think that the Grammys are in any way a just way of grading music.

It's great fun to play with a really good band.