I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much.

I remember Bob Dylan saying in an interview that at a certain point he'd had to learn to do consciously what he'd previously done unconsciously or automatically. That resonates.

One of the beauties of working in radio is the way a whole setting can be richly evoked simply by the addition to the track of a little birdsong and a church bell in the distance.

Some songs seem to achieve the quality of a geometric object - a ball, box, or cone - and I don't mess with 'em.

Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.

I put my clothing into the refrigerator and the foods into my wardrobe

Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them!

I get accused all the time of having a bigmouth. But if you ask me, guys gossip way more than girls do.

It doesn't matter if you're famous or infamous. All that matters is you're a celebrity.

Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.

The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

My own brain. When I get it out of the way, I'm fine.

From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.