15% Kerouacian shabby-chic impenetrability
“But in the world there is never just one way of living. It’s more like a big junkyard. Put it this way: I’m not afraid I’m going to end up on a space station in aluminium-foil underwear.”

12% Tubercular wheezing

12% Yips, growls and barks

12% Clinking, clanking noises
“I started seeing things by the side of the road, and saying to myself, ‘I wonder what that sounds like?’ I’d go into a hardware store and think, ‘I have to bring a mallet in here, start hitting things.’ ”

11% Newton’s law of universal gravitation
“Anyone who has ever played a piano would really like to hear how it sounds when dropped from a 12th-floor window.”

9% Cultivated Williamsburgian bohemianism

8% Off-the-cuff bamboozlement
“No one really wants you to tell them how it’s done any more than you want to know how a card trick is done. If you want a recipe for banana bread, I’ll leave three things out.”

6% Spotify playlist one-upmanship
“Oh, uh, you know — Bill Brassiere and the Sleepwalking Assassins. Beaumont Zipperhorn and the Canadian Ankle-fan … Ginger-Poodle and the Shoehorn Orchestra … I.B. Trickle-Shirt and the Belvedere Shine-Holes. My favorite is that new gal. Wears all black, sings real dreary songs: Matinee.”

5% Disposophobia
“The ingredients of most songs are such are that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall or the flavor of a soda they stopped making, one chord, a variety of mis-recollections and a girl’s name you made up.”

4% Carbo-loaded imitation spontaneity

2011: “There’s something so modular about a song, they fit in your pocket just like bagels.”

2011: “Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel.”

2011: “I think most film directors wish they were writing songs, it’s more like a bagel you can put in your pocket.”

2006: “I figure [CDs are] like the bagel. They were designed to be carried in your pocket.”

2002: “[Songs are] little vessels of emotional information and you carry them in your pocket like a bagel.”]

3% “Hints from Heloise”
[“People who can fix anything with string are disappearing. I think most things can be fixed with string, but we need to be reminded of that. Except if you pour a Fresca into your computer, I don’t think that will work.”]

2% Billy Crystal repeatedly intoning: “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.”

1% A folded-up Daily Racing Form, a manual Smith-Corona and a porkpie hat