“We break the rules, but it’s mostly because we don’t know what the rules are. It’s easy for us to go to certain places, so I’m not surprised that a lot of people were amused by my songwriting style.”

A lot of my heroes are artists and a lot of my musical heroes have an artistic side.

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

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.

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.

The real story is that I had unprotected sex. That’s that. That’s easy.

Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.

Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.

Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.

Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.