“I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like. Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it’s fundamentally emotional.”

Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.

The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That’s enlarging.

Listening. That’s what music is about. You hear it. And I’d listen to it and something would move me one way or another; and I would try and play it.

And for me there’s still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.

I like all the kinds of music I’ve been into. I’m certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff.

If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.

If you’re able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you.

In folk music, I’ve always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don’t know anything about the characters, you don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing something important. I love that. I’m really a sucker for that kind of song.

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.

Some things may work, but they definitely won’t work every time. Some things may work at various times.

It’s much too late to do anything about rock & roll now.

Right now, America is under the gun. It’s being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.

Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically.

If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life.

We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.

I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn’t move me, and I tried to analyze.

The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Although we can get to know ourselves better by sitting down and analyzing our characteristics or by listening to others’ perspectives on us, I believe that tidying is the best way.

It’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.

Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.

I don’t analyze songs because I think it will make me a better songwriter, I just do it out of sheer curiosity.

I love to be in the moment; I love to analyze things a bit.