My music comes from country music. Merle Haggard is God, and I do believe that. I'm not too tuned in to country music. I don't know who Brooks and Dunn are. I like Shania Twain, though!

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

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.

The deepest realization of meditation is that your being is a non-being. It is a nothing, a vast emptiness without boundaries. It is a no-self. The feeling of self, of "I" is false.

I mean, I did plays in high school, but I was convinced you couldn't make a living doing it.

Self-acceptanc e leads to success, not the other way around.

She said if she couldn't play, she had nothing left. What about me?

The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.

I think comedy is the hardest art form there is.

I grew up in dance studios. I was forced to be in several numbers in recitals and dance competitions. I took one tap class - literally one class - and then I quit.

Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.

Hey, single malt scotch, youre thirty years old. When are you going to settle down and get married to my stomach?

Ignorance is a cure for nothing.