Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.

No one likes to have less than they had before. That's the nature of the human animal.

We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.

The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.

I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

I learned a woman is never an old woman.

Everyone I know has attention deficit, and they say it with great pride. It's a bad time to be right.

Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time.

At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.

There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.

Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped!

Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.

You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.

The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth.

I hate show business.

We managed to put together a compilation that had some creativity to it. In the meantime I was listening to the free radio stations and I noticed that during their war coverage they were playing these songs born out of the Vietnam War that were all critical of the soldiers.

My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.

I can't remember anything I ever wrote.

This is a nation that has lost the ability to be self-critical, and that makes a lie out of the freedoms.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n' roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn't roll. He has got no swing in him.

With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.

Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.

Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.

I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.

When you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished... that's kind of disappointing.

Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.

An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child.

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

Because I'm so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.

But I have a tremendous will to live and a tremendous 'joie de vivre,' alternating with irritability.

Drag wasn't always counterculture.

Edith Piaf knocked my socks off when I was 8, but I didn't know what she was singing about.

Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.

I always thought the women of song don't get along, and I don't know why that is.

I certainly don't want to be an angry old artist.

I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.

I conceived in art college at the age of 20, near the end of term.

I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshiped or spat out.

I don't like to make fluffy little songs, but now I want to make some light songs.

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.

I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.

I have an aversion to being mislabeled. Here's a label I'd accept: I'm an 'individual.' I'm someone who can't follow, and doesn't want to lead.