People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has.

In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful.

Basically, in 'American Pie,' things are heading in the wrong direction. It is becoming less ideal, less idyllic. I don't know whether you consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense.

But I knew - in the old days, if a song was a good song, I don't care if it was 'Yellow Submarine' or, you know, or 'The Times They Are a-Changin' or 'Don't Be Cruel', you knew it, you know? You heard that song, and you were talking about it, and you knew it.

Every thread of creation is held in position by still other strands of things living.

I actually feel I'm in a much better place than I've ever been because I'm thankful people still love the songs that I've written, and they seem to like me. And they come to the shows in droves, and they get all excited, and I can still hit all the notes, and I don't look terrible.

I am what I do, and that's partly why I don't want to give up singing. But when I can't sing well, I will.

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.

I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.

I got my first guitar when I was 16. I'd play for my family and friends, but taking that guitar out there into the wide, wide world wasn't something I ever thought about.

I had asthma when I was a kid, asthma so bad that it would turn into pneumonia and I almost died several times. Nobody knew why back then, but now it's obvious.

I have a weird sense sometimes of what's going to happen before it happens, and I kind of live by that, which is how my instincts operate, I suppose.

I just started playing guitar and started singing and started working on this act that I would call 'Don McLean' when I was probably in high school.

I mean, I've been given a terrific life by the audiences who stuck with me all over the world.

I think longevity is more important than trying to make people realize you're around every second.

I was always just into my music and maybe into trying to save the world a little bit. I never really thought I'd have a hit record or anything like that. I was prepared to travel around all over the country, kind of like a Johnny Appleseed, and sing.

I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I'm glad that my music has helped other people as it's helped me. It makes me glad that I did what I did with my life.

If something comes up I might write about it, but without an outlet the whole thing winds down.

In the autumn of 1970 I had a job singing in the school system, playing my guitar in classrooms.

Over the years I've had more and more of an association with Nashville.

The kids today all seem to think they should be stars, but I wasn't brought up that way.

There's always a fundamental misery that's with me that I always relate to some bit of loss or something. I don't know what it is about me, but even though I'm happy on the surface, there's something there, I guess. So, it all comes from wherever it comes from. I really don't know where that is.

When I go on the road now, which is less than before, but still more than I'd like to, I think of myself primarily as a singer. Not a songwriter, not a celebrity, just a man who likes to sing.

We all got up to dance. Oh but we never got the chance

And as the players tried to take the field, the Marching Band refused to yield.

In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

Writing a really general parser is a major but different undertaking, by far the hardest points being sensitivity to context and resolution of ambiguity.

The use of the polygraph has done little more than create confusion, ambiguity and mistakes.

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

If I take refuge in ambiguity, I assure you that it's quite conscious.

Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.

These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.

You know, people who almost - yeah, there's a slight reluctance there - but there's also an ambiguity. What are their morals? What is their code of living. What are they really doing here. And it is just interesting because it is never black or white.

On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.

The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.

The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what hap- pens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.

I'm a participant in the doctrine of constructive ambiguity.

Ambiguity in directors is a hard thing to deal with.