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.

I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians.

I think it is wrong that we went against The U.N. and that we have alienated our allies and invaded a country that hasn't threatened us, that it is a pre-emptive strike.

It is the people who scream the loudest about America and Freedom who see to be the most intolerant for a differing point of view.

I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

Because I was starting out in my 20's. I wanted to do it on my own. I didn't want to use my dad or have people say I was using him.

I was down with Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin-Carpenter. We did an acoustic tour, just the three of us, three chicks and three guitars.

I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing.

The new record started out being about loss, but it's morphed into being about how relationships go on even though one person is not in a body anymore.

When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming.

It's a little dangerous for me to get outside myself and think about how I want people to see me.

I love mixing up my genres.

And I don't think that success is going to destroy me at this point in my life, like I used to think.

My record label is treating me like I'm a new artist, which is exciting after all this time.

For the first time in 23 years I'm enjoying the process of supporting it, of going out and doing shows, and doing the interviews, and doing everything.

If Mr. [V.S.] Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature, then he must be intolerably stupid.

We talk about your drinking But not about your thirst You set off through the minefield Like you were rounding first

The religion I have is music. Even the times I have headaches, when I'm singing, I can't feel them. My dad used to say that, too, especially near the end of his life. He would be in pain - a lot of pain - and he said the only time when he didn't feel pain was when he performed and sang.

My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.

Like Thornton Wilder said, time is not a river, but rather a landscape that you step in and out of. I've always found that true of creative work, and I've heard so many songwriters and writers in general say the same thing. When you're going into the realms of your self and trying to tap into the mystery of this creative source, linear time kind of falls away.