The key to change... is to let go of fear,

If a relationship is founded on love it doesn't end.

Well, the first year I lost my voice I didn't mind so much because I was going to have a baby and I was distracted with him anyway, I didn't even think about it that much, well, OK, this is what's happening.

And I kind of said to myself if I get my voice back I'm not going to take back the old anxiety about it and just focus on the limitations. I'm really going to enjoy it.

Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.

Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.

For me, art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion.

Once your kids get older and get out of the house, it's not like it stops. They're on the phone with me every day; I'm intimately involved in their problems.

Yeah, I was in the phase for the last ten years or so where every record I made I said OK, that's the last one, I don't want to record anymore, I don't want to do this any more, I don't want to have a public life.

I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer.

I wanted to be a songwriter.I didn't so much want to be a performer.I more grew into that just from being a songwriter.

I think any young person who is going into the same field as their parent whose parent has been very successful, it's complicated.And it was complicated for me.

You stand in front of a great painting and your heart just opens and your mind expands about what's possible. That, to me, is a connection to what God is.

I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.

I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.

I was a songwriter; that was the torch I carried. This is an honorable profession. This is what I do.

As John Adams said, all democracies will eventually self-destruct. We seem to be doing it very quickly.

I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.

I think that my sensitivity to music has actually deepened and expanded as I've gotten older. You add more life experience.

We are creating a culture where content creators are a new servant class, and paid as such.

I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children.

I don't do comparisons because I always lose.

If I ignore my work, I start having anxiety attacks.

Sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins.

I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.

If you're playing in a tradition and you have no reference point to it, no understanding and have not studied it, I can't respect that.

It was never too late to undo who you had become.

Work ... is redemption.

Southern gentility is evocative to me.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.

With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant.

Isn't that the goal, as you grow older? That you start reclaiming those parts of yourself you didn't recognize or didn't think were there all along? That's what happened when I made The River and the Thread record.

I spent nearly two hours deciding on an outfit that would look as if the subject of clothing had never crossed my mind, but would in fact show off my best features and miraculously hide the extra pounds.

Documenting one's life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit.

The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

Being in Vietnam changed him [Johnny Cash] fundamentally. He was devastated when we went into Iraq.

Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.

I think books find their way to you when you need them. Whenever I feel like I'm not going to live to read all the books I want to read, I remind myself that the important ones find their way to me.

More and more, I see myself as a folk musician, and someone who values context.

Reading inspirational and motivational quotes daily is like taking my vitamins.

I was angry at my parents when I had to have brain surgery, that they weren't still around, because no matter how old you are you want you parents when you're going through something like that.

Just a thank you is a mighty powerful prayer. Says it all.

Every person's every action has an effect.

I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10, 20, 30, 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.

I choose not to give energy to the emotions of revenge, hatred or the desire to subjugate.

I do not believe in terrorism, violence, destruction, murder, pre-emption, or War.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves.

No, my step-daughter just opened a theatre school for children, I have another daughter who works in the record industry and another who is going back to collage and I have two little ones at home.