The [Bob] Dylan sessions were very disorganized, to say the least. I mean, the "Like A Rolling Stone" session I was invited by the producer to watch.

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.

If you'd done a good job you'd just step back and let all these different chemistries interact and let it go.

Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.

I liked being challenged by music. It's good for me.

...You couldn't help being influenced by Dylan.

I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after "Like A Rolling Stone".

Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.

Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He's not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.

Every now and then we could steal somebody else's stuff.

The book: an umbrella against ignorance

We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.

To get to know a country, you must have direct contact with the earth. It's futile to gaze at the world through a car window.

A man's profundity may keep him from opening on a first interview, and his caution on a second; but I should suspect his emptiness, if he carried on his reserve to a third.

I think we need to think of capitalism as a very bad way of organizing communism. Much of what we do is already communism, so just expand it.

Nor myrtle--which means chiefly love: and love Is something awful which one dare not touch So early o' mornings.

There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.

Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible.

Results matter! They matter to your credibility.

I'm the only one who can stop me.. I'm the one who's been sitting at the stoplight all these years, waiting for the light to turn green.