“If you don’t think drugs have done good things for us, then take all of your records, tapes and CD’s and burn them.”

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 write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

Everything was black in the harbor, but there were still some fires burning on the ships.

When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.

If he were on fire, he couldn’t act as if he were burning. He can’t out-act me on the big screen.

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind’s clothing with more sooty knowledge.