Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.

It's hard to win when you always lose.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

I'm just trying to make a buck like everyone else.

George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.

Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.

Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.

The piano has been drinking, not me.

I'm so horny the crack of dawn better watch out.

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning.

As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.

But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

George Burns was a Vaudeville performer I particularly loved.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.

I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.

I don't know if any genuine, meaningful change could ever result from a song. It's kind of like throwing peanuts at a gorilla.

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.

I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have.

I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.

I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he was aware of it. And you know what they do when they become aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very vulnerable place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.

I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.

I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.

If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.

Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.

Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it. You find that out really fast.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs.

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.

My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.

Oh, I got a beautiful 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille four-door. No one will ride in it with me.

People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up.

Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it.

Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.

Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.

The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.

What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it.

When I was younger, I wanted to be older. Now I am older, I am not quite so sure.

When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.