Like most kids, I grew up singing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ in grammar school, but with the most radical verses neatly removed. This was before I knew it was a Woody Guthrie song.
I just had a child on purpose at age 56, I’m pretty f – ing optimistic.
The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it’s right before you die – maybe.
I’ve been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now, and I never get tired of the view.
I really believe that if I make records that are indispensable to my audience, they’ll go out and spend money to buy them, even if they’ve already downloaded them. If they can afford it. If they can’t, I’d rather they be able to download it than not get it at all.
I don’t separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there’s a word processor and a guitar.
I was born on this mountain, this mountains my home, she holds me and keeps me from worry and woe.
I’m used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn’t understand how political “Copperhead Road” is isn’t listening very well.
I’m from Texas. I hitchhiked to Tennessee when I was 19 years old, and it is really beautiful in Tennessee.
I think it’s obvious that democracy is something that is contagious, and it always has been.
Me, I’m spiritually retarded, I need to be knee deep in water with a fly rod in my hands, that’s about as close to God as I get.
Or you can be like the Soviet Union, start out with ideals, and end up ceasing to exist.
I still write more songs about girls than anything else.
Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it’s anything else. It just doesn’t fly if it isn’t musical.
I mainly read non-fiction, and that’s probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don’t know.
My dad was in a wheelchair and on oxygen for the last few years of his life.
Records are only one-dimensional. Even film is only one-dimensional. That’s why music and live theatre is so important, because it’s not the same thing. A recording is just a record of part of the experience, but it’s not the whole experience.
I’m not going to waste a second feeling sorry for myself because I’m not a bigger star than I am. I can walk down the street in most places in the world and I still drive really nice cars.
I’m one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.
I can deal with conservatives in a democracy. With real conservatives, I don’t agree with them, but I understand why they believe what they believe and I believe they’re being honest with me about it.