"The great thing about Nashville back in the day was that the old guys hung out where the young guys were. The established writers like Harlan Howard and Jack Clement gave us encouragement and passed the guitar, you know? Chet Atkins let me sit in on his sessions. Everybody was good to us, and everybody loved the music."

"I hope that I'll keep being creative until they throw dirt on me."

"I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it."

"I feel like sometimes, when I'm singing a song like 'Moment of Forever,' that it goes both to your significant other and to the audience, and was it wonderful for you, you know? I think the best love songs I've written work on that level, like 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.'"

"When I wrote 'Help Me Make It Through the Night,' I was on an oil platform out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and was just thinking of myself."

"I was never big or fast, but I got to play football and box."

"I was in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas. I've argued for Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the United Farm Workers. I've been a radical for a long time. I guess it's too bad. I'd be more marketable as a right-wing redneck. But I got into this to tell the truth as I saw it."

"I really have no anxiety about controlling my own life."

"I feel like an old boxer. The brain's gone, but I can still move around."

"That's who I wanted to be like was Bob Dylan."

"I can interpret my own work honestly. And performing by myself seems to focus the attention in the right places."

"What really makes me happy now is my home. I know that I have that to lose. But I don't see losing it. And I don't care if I never do another movie. And I don't care if I never get back on the road. I like to think that I'm gonna do that. But if I don't, I can live with that."

"Havin' Dylan cover one of your songs is like being a playwright and having Shakespeare act in your play."

"I thought he was the greatest thing. Bob Dylan."

"I remember I had an actor friend - a close friend from college - Anthony Zerbe. He sent me a telegram before I started my first movie, 'Cisco Pike.' It said, 'Have a good time. Ignore the camera.' That was the extent of my training."

"I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time."

"I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters."

"I watched Dylan record 'Blonde On Blonde' in my first week at work at CBS. It was just incredible."

"Look at me! I can go from 'Donny and Marie' to Sam Peckinpah to Radio City Music Hall in one week."

"If 'Bobby McGee' lasts, if 'Star Is Born' lasts, if 'Help Me Make It through the Night' lasts, if all of 'em last, man... who cares?"

"As far as fame, the everlasting fame thing. I used to think that was important for a writer... the desire to make your mark."

"They say the first thing to go is your legs, then it's your reflexes, then it's your friends."

"Every time I turn on the radio, I must be on the wrong song or something. But, to be honest, since I went on the road back in 1970, I didn't listen to radio music because I didn't want to subconsciously steal somebody's stuff."

"The first movie I was ever on was a Dennis Hopper film down in Peru."

"It's always embarrassing when somebody does something praiseworthy of you."

"My old man worked for Pan American."

"Bobby Bare is one of the greatest people in country music."

"Every album I've made is about what I'm experiencing at the time."

"My albums really are like scrapbooks to me."

"I have no neighbors. I live in a small town where everybody is very protective of me."

"Looking back, I'm surprised I had the nerve to do it, but I'm glad I did. Performing the songs and performing in film was just a part of my personality, just like football and boxing at one point in my life. I was able to lose myself in both of them, and that was a good feeling."

"To do the things that I did, I'm amazed that I had the audacity - like resigning from the Army and becoming a janitor and a songwriter."

"Right after I resigned from the Army in 1965, I flew helicopters for oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. I flew personnel from rig to rig, and I'd live on a platform out at sea."

"I think it's kind of odd that 'This Old Road' was the first video I ever did. Because of all of the work I had done in films and everything, you'd think I would have done a video before that."

"'This Old Road' somehow seems to get better the older you get."

"I did co-write 'Moment of Forever' with Danny Timms. He wrote the melody, and I just did the words."

"I've never really felt comfortable co-writing. I usually go at my own speed, you know."

"'Sunday Morning Coming Down' is probably the most directly autobiographical thing I'd written. In those days, I was living in a slum tenement that was torn down afterwards, but it was $25 a month in a condemned building, and 'Sunday Morning Coming Down' was more or less looking around me and writing about what I was doing."

"Songs are just like your kids. You love them all, and they're all different. I can't really pick out favourites."

"I ended up being friends with all my heroes. Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Johnny Cash - it was incredible."

"Dylan's relationship with Johnny Cash was the biggest influence on Nashville in my lifetime - they opened up country music."

"I've come to appreciate how special a song is compared to other art forms, because you can carry it around in your head and your heart, and it remains part of you. It just comes as natural as a bird to me, always did. It's the way singer-songwriters make sense of our lives."

"I've tried to be more self-sufficient as I've gotten older. I'd like to not worry about whether they're going to sell my next album or book. Hell, William Blake wasn't even published in his lifetime."

"The older I get, the less conservative I become."

"Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end."

"My thirsty wanted whiskey..."

"The heart is what matters most of all"

"Sometimes you just get burnt out with fashion."

"I am definitely not a fashionista, I can't live up to that title, I don't want to. Sometimes I look like a slob, but I wouldn't do a job if I couldn't be involved in the style and wardrobe of my character."

"I do a lot of comedy and I like that. I am happy doing funny films. I am often the straight person in a comedy, which is great as long as there are talented people to work with."