“I am the entertainer, I’ve come to do my show You’ve heard my latest record, it’s been on the radio”

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.

I have been both praised and criticized. The criticism stung, but the praise sometimes bothered me even more. To have received such praise and honors has always been puzzling to me.

I once heard some idiot on the radio saying that all great art has suffering as its dominant theme, and that the greatest artists are only able to create because they suffer immensely in their own lives. What a bunch of bullshit.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

We had a relationship that lasted 44 years. Herbert and I lived together 10 years before we were married. He always gave me a little heart for whatever anniversary.

So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old. And then, indeed as the ballad says, you just fade away

Even one voice can be heard loudly all over the world in this day and age.

How happy it is to believe, with a steadfast assurance, that our petitions are heard even while we are making them; and how delightful to meet with a proof of it in the effectual and actual grant of them.

Did you hear something, nora? Vee asked. I thought i heard something. You definitely heard something, i agreed. Could that be a dog fart i heard? Vee asked me.

I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen…It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.