“I don’t think [Dylan and the Beatles] influenced me a lot. I think it was inevitable; they were so powerful that you couldn’t really escape the influence.”

I’ve got nothing to do today but smile.

The degree of customization possible through your Preferences screens is awesome.

If you can get humor and seriousness at the same time, you’ve created a special little thing, and that’s what I’m looking for, because if you get pompous, you lose everything.

Far above the golden clouds, the darkness vibrates. The earth is blue. And everything about it is a love song. Everything about it.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I felt that I was special, because I could play the guitar and write songs.

Having a track record to live up to and the history of successes had become a hindrance. It becomes harder to break out of what people expect you to do.

Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.

I don’t consider myself to be a major talent, so the only solace I can take is to hope I’m growing.

How much can you do with two voices? You can sing thirds or you can sing fifths or you can do a background harmony.

Music is sometimes the only benign avenue of communication between antagonists.

I stepped outside to smoke a J and when I came back to the room, everybody just seemed to move.

There is a moment, a chip in time, when leaving home is the lesser crime.

Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.

If you’ll be my body guard, I can be your long lost pal.

Then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right, there must be fifty ways to leave your lover.

So I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end, and flowers never bend with the rainfall.

People are running, running, but there is no place in the world to which they can flee to escape themselves. Ultimately, each one must face himself.

There is no escape – man drags man down, or man lifts man up.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker… there is no escape… people drag others or lift others up.

The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

Take me from this wasteland, for I have longed for an escape like a bird that craves the wilderness, from every corner of his cage.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.