“There are only four things in all cleaners – whether it’s shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label.”

When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough.

People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.

I remember when I was first starting out in the late 50’s, and everybody at that time said rock ‘n roll was gonna die.

Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.

Anything that’s left that’s remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It’s not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.

Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.

I think it’s pointless asking questions like “Will humanity survive?” It’s purely up to people – if they want to, they can, if they don’t want to, they won’t.

You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

When you go into MMA you really can’t do it half-assed. If you do it half-assed, then you’re going to get annihilated.

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.

We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.

Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

My eyes went blank, and I stared off, and the music started. It was raining, and the sun was shining at the same time.

You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

I got an attitude, that’s rude because I walked over Elvis’ grave in some blue suede shoes.

That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it .

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

People like Clyde McPhatter who came out of the black churches – like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin – were all church singers who became great pop singers because gospel singing is very close to the blues.

And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? – Where the water turns a deeper blue.

I don’t believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue … It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.