“I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions.”

So gradually, and then I had an Italian roadster that I built, it took me five years to build it, it was stolen from me and stripped. I said, well maybe we should have another where we shouldn’t steal from each other.

The big turning point, really, was the Beatles’ influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came the Lovin’ Spoonful and everybody else.

You tell me over and over and over again, my friend, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Marches alone won’t bring integration when human respect is disintegratin

I remember we woke up one morning at Denny’s house and John Phillips called. He said, you guys okay? We said, yeah, what’s wrong, what’s going on? He said, well, everybody’s dead over at Sharon’s house at Terry Melcher’s place.

That’s why I had to leave Hair on Broadway, because I did it for about a year, and one night I was doing the show, and I realized, well, this is not real. I told the director. He says, man, it was a killer show tonight.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China, then take a look around to Selma, Alabama.

To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true… I’ve never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.

You may leave here for four days in space, but when you return it’s the same old place.

So he was opening night… I was out of a job, and I’d been to every producer in Hollywood trying to get a job singing. But nobody wanted to know me.

But times changed, and I changed, and I didn’t feel that way anymore. The Beatles were happening. I think that was probably the main thing. The Beatles just changed the whole world of music.

There’s only one drummer. We all travel to his beat. Well, I couldn’t sing his song. Because for me, it wasn’t a truthful statement. Well, Linda sang it, and it was a monster for her.

And there was a real shedding of the old dogma, like boundaries of morality were being broken down and everybody was into the new party mode of just loving on each other. Which destroyed thousands of us. I lost 16 of my personal friends through that lifestyle.

And a friend of mine in the Christys, we used to sit up at night and talk and read and wonder if reincarnation, and if it wasn’t reality, what would happen to the human spirit when the body dies? Is there an afterlife? Just questions like that.

It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn’t play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.

When I wrote ‘Green, Green,’ it was like a really a statement of where I was at philosophically in my life.

… we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation….

When they saw you kneeling, crying words you mean. Opening their eyeballs, eyeballs, pretending that your Al Green, Al Green.

I define “grindin'” as just nonstop work! Nonstop work, nonstop progress. Can’t sleep during that grind – I mean, you get a little bit of it, but if you’re progressin’ at every hour, every second, you are grindin’.

To a woman–I mean, a nice woman–there is no such thing as men. There is a man; and either she is so fond of him that she can talk of nothing else, however unfavourably, or so much in love with him that she never mentions his name.

Keep focused on the substantive issues. To make a decision means having to go through one door and closing all others.

Moving away from “useful” doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. You can still need poetry while also needing money or food or physical health.

The more I am aware of my mortality the better person I am and the better I am at choosing a life that is aware of its beauty.

The need of the hour is that your life should be revolutionised.