“I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.”

That’s the most important thing, to get along with people. When you feel like you click with them.

Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won’t bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records.

I don’t like to have everything all worked out in my head because there’s always a chance of it coming out different than you think it should anyway.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.

I have had UFO experiences, and yet, at the same time, I can easily be convinced that none of it is true. It’s hard to say whether or not you’re a believer.

It’s obvious you shouldn’t steal, kill or be cruel.

I don’t want to do children’s music. I write kids songs, but the kids songs I write are for my kids – like when I’m putting them to bed.

I’m always looking to rock out. But it isn’t really about rocking out versus being mellow, in terms of your personal satisfaction. In the end, you just want to be good.

When I think about that I get stimulated and excited. It’s a feeling that you can’t label with words.

You think you’ve made something really great, but there’s a reason why it’s not resonating the way some previous work did. But it’s not that easy to just replicate.

If I have more creativity that I want to get out of me, I try to find other ways than pursuing solo records so much.

This is a particular thing, you know, catholic stories of martyrs who had their head removed and then continued to be miraculous in the last moments of their life.

That’s more important even then what their background is or what they’ve done before, how good they are, how new they are or whatever. All that stuff is really secondary to just getting along with the person.

You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual.

I don’t want to be flaky. I don’t want to be some temperamental, hard-to-work-with musician.

Wise is the tongue, wet of perfect thought.

My worst moments as a parent have been much like my greatest moments as a parent: the product of complete and perfect accident.

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

In California, I guess you belong to the state; you don’t even belong to your parents. It’s an old Spanish law. It doesn’t require your parents to swear out a complaint; anybody can.

My parents used to take me to the pet department and tell me it was a zoo.

Where are all the sour patch parents?

We all need that extra friend outside of our immediate family to talk about that extra stuff you wouldn’t normally talk to your parents about.

It was a mixed blessing to have famous parents. It was tough to go to auditions and be bad, since I couldn’t be anonymous.

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.