I don't feel like I have a lot of reference to sexual innuendo on my songs.

You're born and then you're on your own, you start having relationships, you're developing relationships to the world and your wider community, and then disappointing things happen.

I have a hard time really claiming my place as a songwriter or as doing anything of import really because I feel like I'm tooting my own horn in a way.

I do feel songwriting is a bit of its own creature and the writerliness of it...it's freeing. It's good for people who have an innate resistance to any restrictions whatsoever.

Sometimes I joke around that if I weren't a musician, I would be a power lifter. I don't think people expect it from me because I'm little.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps.

You try to do as little as you can, but you need to do as much as is necessary to get a result. When you get a result, you do less.

If there wasn't The Beach Boys and there wasn't music, I wouldn't even talk to them. But through the music I fell in love with my brothers.

I don't see any coronation coming my way

There is no distrust of men and mankind in me. They will answer before God, so why should I worry?

I believe that the only true agents of change on a large scale, in this country or anywhere, are young people.

If you hit a hole in one every hole, you wouldn’t play golf for very long.

Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.

Men do not mirror themselves in running water - they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.