Great Throughts Treasury

"Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I'll just say this really quickly - they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves."

"As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release."

"Don't confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them."

"Caught between the longing for love, and the struggle for the legal tender, where the sirens sing and the church bells ring, and the junk man pounds his fender. Where the veterans dream of the fight, fast asleep at the traffic light, and the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor."

"And my dad wanted me to play the trumpet because that's what he liked. His idol was Louis Armstrong. My dad thought my teeth came together in a way that was perfect for playing the trumpet."

"Coffee in the morning, cocaine afternoons."

"Eleven on a scale of ten, honey, let me introduce you to my redneck friend."

"Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy."

"Famine and disaster, right there in front of you, and the more you watch, the less you do."

"Forget what life used to be, you are what you choose to be. It's whatever it is you see that life will become."

"Got seven women on my mind. Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, and one says she's a friend of mine."

"I followed those highway signs and I've run down those thin white lines."

"I let her do some of my laundry and she slipped in a few meals in between, and next thing I remember, she was all moved in."

"I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain."

"I never was a very good singer."

"I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight."

"I look around for the friends I used to turn to pull me through. Looking into their eyes, I see them running, too."

"I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up."

"I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it."

"I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar."

"I want to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means, and we'll fill in the missing numbers in each others paint-by-numbers dreams."

"I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad."

"I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it."

"I was doing my best Bogart, but I was having trouble getting into her jeans."

"I'm losing touch with reality and I'm almost out of blow. It's such a fine line, I hate to see it go. Cocaine, runnin' all 'round my brain."

"I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, it could be that I've lost my way."

"In the end, they traded their tired wings for the resignation that living brings. And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge, and in the moment they were swept before the deluge."

"It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before."

"I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs."

"I've also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament - it was about 1982 - they called it Peace Sunday."

"Let the disappointments pass, let the laughter fill your glass."

"Lighten up while you still can, don't even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand, and take it easy."

"Let the music keep our spirits high, let the buildings keep our children dry, let creation reveal its secrets by and bye."

"Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that's not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don't know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don't have any pressure on me."

"No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone."

"Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?"

"Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they're really mean to each other about who makes what."

"Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, I'd like to study piano."

"No matter how fast I run, I can't get away from me."

"Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?"

"People look around you, the signs are everywhere. You've left it for somebody other than you to be the one who to care."

"Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country."

"Say a prayer for the pretender, who started out so young and strong only to surrender."

"So I had a couple of years of playing trumpet. I really enjoyed it, but it was not the kind of instrument you could whip out at a party. Let's face it."

"So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life."

"That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played."

"The first to come and the last to go, working for that minimum wage."

"Talk about celestial bodies."

"That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things."

"The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs."