What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.

This is about black people selling out other black people.

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand.

I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty.

It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news.

Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.

People have the right to say what they want to.

Do I think it's OK to fight authority as long as you're only talking about the high school teacher? No.

What's the difference? One guy's the same as the other.

I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.

Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.

People in Indiana have known me for 25 years. They've known George Bush four.

If fans are going to turn on me because of this, they weren't my fans anyway. I couldn't betray a whole 25 years of record making and not do this. I had to.

I'm using my art to comment on what I see. You don't have to agree with it.

I'm your average Joe guy. I don't really care for politicians.

Wait a minute, guys, I have always been on your side. I have always spoken for you, always tried to put on a good face for the state of Indiana. All of a sudden, some of you people think I'm a bad guy?

You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better, but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.

I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs.

A lot of record company people, even though they're our age, want to be perceived as young hip guys, and they're hurting the business.

I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.

When people are afraid, they make emotional decisions.

I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles.

I thought I knew a lot about music. Then you start digging and the deeper you go, the more there is.

I've just been fortunate to havehad a lot of hit records, though Human Wheels doesn't qualify as a hit record-but it's really the best single I've ever had.

I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?

When you live in hysteria, people start thinking emotionally.

I would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.

We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing.

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.

In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.

'Crumbling' Down' is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president - he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.

'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.

A lot of the time, I write in the third person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get free, you must defeat your ghosts.

All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.

American folk songs were about tragedy, right? They were about suffering and tragedy, and a lot of my songs are about that, even though they were misunderstood.

As I get older, I have a different look on life. I just try to be a little more tolerant and a little bit more centered about what's going on around me and not so emotional.

As I've matured as a songwriter, I realize that if it's out there, it's mine.

Broadway is a very different kind of place. It's kind of like Nashville in that there's a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it.

Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

Hanging out is a waste of time. The only time I would hang out was when I was a kid, I would hang out in the streets. But once I started making records, I stopped hanging out.

I believe in something, even if it's just me.

I ended up writing songs and growing up in public with my songwriting. And it's a good thing for me back then: in the early '70s, there was a thing called artist development, where an artist could find his feet, find himself, find his voice. I think I made five or six albums before I sold five or six albums.

I have to say when a man lives for himself, it's hard to live with him. That's pretty much the story of all my divorces. I've been making records since I was 22 and done things my way, and it's hard for me to compromise. And of course, to have a successful relationship, one has to compromise. Sometimes I'm not good at it.