I want to have fun. I want to shine like the sun. I want to be the one that you want to see. I want to knit you a sweater. I want to write you a love letter. I want to make you feel better. I want to make you feel free.

Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling. It`s the unraveling and it undoes all the joy that could be.

When I think of your kisses my mind see-saws.

All I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you too.

I love you when I forget about me.

Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.

When you`re trying to pass on the best of the stuff you`re culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished... that`s kind of disappointing.

I hate show business.

The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don`t have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth.

Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It`s a bad time to he right.

The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don`t think this is heavy.

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

At the point where I`m trying to force something and it`s not happening, and I`m getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

Back then, I didn`t have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn`t enough time.

No one likes to have less than they had before. That`s the nature of the human animal.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn`t like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians.

When you reach that kind of successful pinnacle, it is the nature of the business and the press and everything that they go about tearing you down.

We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers.

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it`s just complaining.

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don`t see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven`t recorded it.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.

You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit`s foot of their particular religion. You don`t really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.

You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n` roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn`t roll. He has got no swing in him.

With a painting, you don`t have to go back and paint it again.

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.

I learned a woman is never an old woman.

I`ve got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

I can`t remember anything I ever wrote.

Buddy Holly and the early rock `n` roll was no lighter than the way I play. It`s very minimal.

I don`t understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

I thrive on change. That`s probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They`ll be going along on one key and I`ll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that`s how my life is.

When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it`s time for artists to make their mark.

My favorite line in all of literature is Rudyard Kipling`s monkey: "My people are the wisest people in the jungle, my people have always said so."

I know my generation - a lot of them, they`re getting old now, and they want to think back fondly, they want to kid themselves. A lot of them think, "Yeah, we were the best". That`s the kiss of death. That`s non-growth. And also that`s very bad for the world.

[addressing young people who may romanticize the 1960s] Don`t just ape our movement. Don`t do hippie poses. Look at us. Admit to yourself that we only took it so far. Build from where we left off.