A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.

My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I'm still a virgin in a lot of ways. I'm not used to being shot down for no reason.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.