“I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.”

I think that we have a unique opportunity as performers and artists to be kind of the town criers and also to get more people to listen, so that’s a blessing and a responsibility that I take very seriously.

My career is based on the slow build of an audience based on putting on a good show live and putting out a record every couple of years.

I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal’s handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone.

We’ve found some things that are suspicious in nature, and we’re going to err on the side of caution.

I have been really heartened by how much coverage there has been about inequality of pay across the board, between the entertainment industry and almost every industry worldwide.

Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.

I have a really full life, both within music and outside it.

Playing guitar was one of my childhood hobbies, and I had played a little at school and at camp.

One of the biggest obstacles I’ve overcome in my life was thinking I didn’t deserve to be successful.

Pat Benatar might need a rock band, but I can just sit with a blues guitar for an hour and a half and do folk songs and great contemporary ballads, and not many people can pull that off.

I always write the script by myself.

The anti-nuke movement has important and far-reaching implications for grassroots organizing.

Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn’t mean that artists from the rock n’ roll/folk-roots culture – of which he was not really a part – shouldn’t get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.

I can’t make you love me, if you don’t.

I have a soft side that I like people to see. I’m not mean. That’s just football. That’s just the way you’ve got to go. You can’t go into a game that is that violent and be soft. You can’t be that way.

The fact is that this conversation is going on at every level at every age, we’re all going, “God, what a jerk I’ve been,” “How could I have married that guy?” or “How could I have done this or that?” With time, this is the gift of being older, that you get to look back and say, “It wasn’t all about them.”

I’m constantly scared. I’m constantly fearful of what’s to come and people don’t realize that.

I did a real boot camp once which with The Thin Red Line which was learning military exercises and this was far less strenuous.

Just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean that you’re fearless but you get up every day and you do it. It takes a lot of courage to be real.

How dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what’s funny, how to build distinctive and original characters.

The BBC came to me and they wanted to adapt the book [Three Musketeers] again, in the straightforward way, and I said no to that.

But after a while you discover that youre really not. Real love is different.

What I think is interesting is that the more you do.

It’s psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you’re trying to depict.