“I am a simple vessel with complex overtones, opinionated on occasions but willing to listen.”

Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.

My Mother set me on the right track, Marty Robbins made me want to write songs, and Jesus Christ did the rest.

Lincolnshire is the Idaho of England. You were either going to drive a tractor for the rest of your life or head for the city to work in a factory.

One reason I quit doing interviews after years and years and years was because I was making things up.

Read books, discover the blues and don’t Tweet.

Captain Fantastic’ was the first album in history to enter the (American) album chart at number one. We did it for a second time after that. Now that’s not a boast, that’s frightening.

My favorite thing is coming up with titles. The majority of the songs I’ve every written I’ve always thought of the title before I’ve written the song.

I like to work quickly; I never like to waste any time. I never write half a song and come back to it later at all. It all has to be done at once. I lose interest if it doesn’t.

My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.

Elton John’s home is laden with trinkets and books relating to Satanism and witchcraft.

The worst thing about me is that I’ll buy albums and put them away on the shelf and forget that I’ve got them.

Basically it takes me very little time to write a song. If I find myself taking more than an hour to do it I usually forget it, and try something else.

The jungle speaks to me because I know how to listen.

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.

When you listen, the benefit is two fold: You receive the necessary information, and you make the other person feel important.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I rarely listen to music while writing. If I don’t like it, it bothers me, and if I like it, it absorbs me so much I can’t write.

My life is short. I can’t listen to banality.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.