In writing songs, I’ve learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.
There’s always one more notch and four more aces Billy, and you’re playin’ all alone.
I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see Creation just about everywhere. The highest form of song is prayer. King David’s, Solomon’s, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the Earth.
I could say that I’d be faithful- I could say it one sweet, easy breath, but to you that would be cruelty and to me it surely would be death.
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.
Dostoevsky, too, had lived a dismal and hard life. The czar sent him to a prison camp in Siberia in 1849. Dostoevsky was accused of writing socialist propaganda. He was eventually pardoned and wrote stories to ward off his creditors. Just like in the early ’70s I wrote albums to ward off mine.
People were people.
If love is a sin, then beauty is a crime.
Then she says, You don’t read women authors do ya? At least that’s what I think I hear her say. Well, I said, how would you know and what would it matter anyway. Well, she says you just don’t seem like you do. I said you’re way wrong. She says which ones have you read then. I say I’ve read Erica Jong.
If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry. But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.
The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.
I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio.
It was like he’d been born and raised on Walden Pond where everything was hunky-dory, and I’d come out of the dark demonic woods, same forest, just a different way of looking at things.
This place don’t make sense to me no more.
She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.
Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them.
The world don’t need any more songs... As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it... There’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated... Unless someone’s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That’s a different story.
I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something to do that.
Sometimes people ask songwriters what a song means, not realizing if they had more words to explain it they would’ve used them in the song.
The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life.
The first thing that has to go is any form of artistic self-expression that’s dear to you. Art is unimportant next to life, and you have no choice. I had no hunger for it, anyway. Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work. It was impossible now for me to observe anything without being observed.