“You know, we just buy music now. We don’t make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it’s so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is.”

Most of the people I admire, they usually smell funny and don’t get out much. It’s true. Most of them are either dead or not feeling well.

The Universe is making music all the time.

Their memory’s like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can’t remember Tell the things you can’t forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

But then I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong. I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.

When your down on your luck and you’ve lost all your dreams theres nothing like a campfire and a can of beans.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete.

For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

All that you’ve loved is all you own.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.

My wife called me a mule. She once said, “I didn’t marry a man; I married a mule!” I kept thinking about it. It was in the back of my head. I think it makes a good title for an album.

You’re innocent when you dream.

I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

I always thought songs are movies for the ears and films are like songs for the eyes.

I felt like I played in a very rough football game with no hitting above the waist.

A humorist tells himself every morning, “I hope it’s going to be a rough day.” When things are going well, it’s much harder to make the right jokes.

News is only the first rough draft of history.

And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.

Entire structures adorned with intricate details of gruesome tales and enchanting myths narrating the grim lives of roughly made up antiheros and their understudies.

I need a love that won’t flee when times get rough.

As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.