“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 just play the music that I love with musicians that I respect, and fortunately, I’m in a position where people are willing to play with me, and perhaps I can do something to help them.

I don’t know that I’m unique in that people relate to my music, but I would hope people would say that I’m honest and that I do the best work I can possibly do instead of coasting.

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.

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.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, ‘Well, so-and-so will like this,’ which you do when you’re younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.

I read very little contemporary anything.