I wasn't in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.

It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel.

I always wanted to be an actor, even as a little kid. So I went to drama school in the late '60s at Carnegie Mellon.

I think I'm the oldest new Bob Dylan around. I predate Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbat and John Prine. I was probably the first of the new Bob Dylans.

Doomsday is quite within our reach, if we will only stretch for it.

I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.

If I had five minutes to live, I don't think I'd be bothered singing a song. I'd be dead, so it won't really matter. I'd have a glass of wine and a cigarette.

Displaying a bland, even an eerie, disregard for what appeared to be the facts of the situation, he fell back on an old habit of looking ahead to the next defeat.

If you're 28 and singing about being over the hill, you're pretending. When you're 67 and singing about it, you know what you're talking about.

Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school.

Why kill good people just to get a bad man?

No Lord Almighty created the humans out of personal will. Creationism is simply a myth created by the weak and ignorant humans out of a psychological need to have a sense of eternal security.

It’s a cruel joke of the universe that the one person who makes me come alive is himself dead. And evil. His very existence defies all moral laws and all known laws of physics.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

You are the Hero of your own Story.

There's something about an American soldier you can't explain. They're so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.

My family was not an artistic family, but somewhere in my head, I thought I might be good at it. I don't know why I thought it. I had no evidence to think I might be good at it.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

My watch say I made it, my chains say I'm rich. Diamonds in my mouth got me talking cash s**t.

The after-silence, when the feast is o'er,And void the places where the minstrels stood,Differs in nought from what hath been before,And is nor ill nor good.