“I’ve lived long enough to have learned, the closer you get to the fire, the more you get burned.”

It’s alright, you can afford to lose a day or two

You may never understand How the stranger is inspired For he is not always evil, And he is not always wrong.

Videos destroyed the vitality of rock and roll. Before that, music said, “Listen to me.” Now it says, “Look at me.”

There’s a deep-seated paranoia that Americans have about not being Americans or something.

And you know that when the truth is told that you can get what you want or you can just get old.

Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.

I don’t know why people thought I was retiring.

Historically, musicians know what it is like to be outside the norm – walking the high wire without a safety net. Our experience is not so different from those who march to the beat of different drummers.

I don’t belong in limos or private jets or on stage with people cheering me but that’s what’s kept me grounded because I know it’s not right.

Call me a joker, call me a fool, right at this moment I’m totally cool.

You’ve got to be hard, like the rock in that old rock & roll.

We’re only human, we’re supposed to make mistakes.

I’ve tried to avoid that all my life. When I wrote about soldiers in Vietnam, I wasn’t trying to make a political statement. I was trying to write about how screwed things were for soldiers, and how they still are.

Most people are satisfied with the junk food being sold as music.

I took a fresh pack of Luckies, a mint called Sen-Sen, my old man’s Trojans.

Sergeant O’Leary is walking the beat, at night he becomes a bar tender.

For a long time on Earth humans didn’t worship good gods; that’s a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.

Here’s proof that if you live long enough, anything is possible.

As long as the body is not in perfect health, you think about it, and that prevents you from thinking of the mind. The sound mind is a sound body.

Our mission has been the protection of the wage-worker, now; to increase his wages; to cut hours off the long workday, which was killing him; to improve the safety and the sanitary conditions of the workshop.

Painting and animation can be kind of long work. Music was more immediate and more fun.

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you’ll never see that your own mind is the Buddha

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

Nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.