"It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way."

"I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself."

"You have to choose whether to love yourself or not."

"Whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, because I love you, yes I do."

"Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground"

"The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side."

"I don't read music. I don't write or read music."

"People have used my songs and guitar style to teach guitar for a long time."

"Performing is a profound experience, at least for me."

"I'm glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it."

"I think it surprises a lot of people that I'm still around, you know, still - that I'm not pushing up daisies, as they say."

"I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite."

"I don't get into heavy political numbers because I don't find them lyrical."

"Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music."

"Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I'm like and I don't really know myself, so how can I tell them?"

"If you feel like singing along, don't."

"When I cleaned up some 17 odd years ago, I felt terrible for about six months. The only thing that gave me any real relief was strenuous physical activity."

"Knowing when to quit is probably a very important thing, but I just am not ready."

"If the gig's going really well, I'm incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things."

"I was in chemical jail."

"I was a functional addict."

"I think that we're all totally isolated beings and always will be."

"I don't think anyone really says anything new."

"I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well."

"Americans work a long away ahead of themselves because of the size of the place. To make any impact at all you have to promote yourself with live performances ages before a release."

"I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die."

"I have a studio in a barn at home - we rehearse there, we film there and we record there. It's fun to hang out with my guys and see what comes out next."

"I enjoy selling my music. I don't enjoy selling myself."

"The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it."

"What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous."

"Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing."

"When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical."

"There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done."

"Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you."

"It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it's a failure."

"I'm very unstable; there's no stability in a musician's life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don't know where your money's coming from."

"Time will take your money, but money won't buy time."

"I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could."

"It's hard to find a way forward. When you're 18 it happens in huge chunks every day, but after 20 years, growth is much more costly."

"If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you."

"Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer."

"Beautiful things don't ask for attention."

"Walter Mitty: To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life."

"All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."

"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."

"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around us in awareness."

"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."

"There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures."

"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."