A commercial is a commercial.

Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records.

Once you decide that it is the art that is important and not how popular and well received you are, you no longer have an albatross.

Sometimes I get a little drunk, sometimes I get a little out of it, sometimes I get out of tune onstage, but that's something that shouldn't be dissected.

The only albatross is the hurt you divine from what people say about your art.

That was when Neil discovered Jack Nietzsche. They went off and pretty much came up with that by themselves, but I thought it was a great song, and I was more than happy to do my harmony parts on it.

An artist cannot be responsible for what people make of their art. An audience loathe giving up preconceived images of an artist.

I feel like I'm just learning how to play the guitar. I mean, really learning to play the guitar.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature.

There were times I thought I was going to turn to the blues, but then I'd hear better blues players.

After about a year or so, I was in L.A.; I'd decided to try to get a band together out there.

I've just built a studio in my mama's old bedroom, which I thought was fitting; she died last year. We've recorded nine songs recorded in there already; we're sort of just chipping away.

God forbid if David Crosby gets sick again and I can't tour anymore, or something happens where I can't get around, what am I going to live on? I'm going to be living on mechanicals. So I don't want to hear it.

David knew everyone because he's such a social butterfly.

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.

One thing the blues ain't, is funny.

I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child.

A commercial is a commercial.

I spent my last year of high school in Latin America, and there's a edge of salsa under all of my rhythms.

I detest talking about myself. There is a reason why people pick up an instrument and put it between themselves and the rest of the world.

I don't set out to write a political song. I am not one of those that feels compelled to write about what's going on.

I much prefer the road. My thing is getting live in front of people. There is a sterile environment to a studio that doesn't make me let go.

I've learned you can't write on a computer on a bus. It jiggles too much, especially an Apple. The keyboard jiggles around too much, and there are too many typos.

Language is an inadequate form of communication. If you've picked up an instrument, it's because you don't feel you are communicating sufficiently.

Unlike President Obama, Mitt Romney has been inside the bubble all his life. He has no idea what's going on here. He has no idea how destructive Bush's eight years were to this country.

We moved around so much when I was a kid, the place I call home is New Orleans because at least I can remember the names of some of the streets there.

You slow down when you get older.

The dead soldiers silence sings our national anthem.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

I won't perform in Cuba until there's no more Castro and there's a free Cuba. To me, Cuba's the biggest prison in the world, and I would be very hypocritical were I to perform there.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

People are amazed to see that I wrote all the words and music myself to 'Stan Freberg Presents The United States Of America.'

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe.

If you're not a daydreamer, you haven't got any imagination.

The true credit for our safety and security goes to our men and women who are serving in places like Iraq and Afghanistan in the global war on terrorism.

Every nerve that can thrill with pleasure, can also agonize with pain.

You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.

Age is just a number, and your talent will never fail you. It has no expiry date.

I was not able to be the front forward of a soccer team - that is a way to make people super happy every Sunday. What I can do is tell stories and try to put my coin in that discussion.

Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence.

The way to succeed is to double your error rate.

I believe every woman's body is beautiful in its own way. I have never understood that just because a woman has thick thighs, she is considered fat. For so long, I've been around in the modeling world and have tried to break that barrier. But I think now it's turning around.

Then, in 1983 I went on a very long concert tour all over Europe.

I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger.

It seems like every year Hollywood makes an attempt to retell the Manson story, and I just couldn't be less interested in it. It's not really our crowning achievement as a civilisation. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it just bores me.

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

I left advertising as fast as I could in 1961. And I haven't ever thought about going back.