Natalie from the Dixie Chicks could have said what she said before 9-11 and no one would have cared.

Radio was my friend after 'Jack & Diane' and 'Hurts So Good.'

This cycle of make a record, tour has been going on for 20 years now. I don't even know why I do it sometimes. Do I need more money? Do I need more platinum and gold records? The only thing I can think of is ego.

Wait a minute, guys, I have always been on your side. I have always spoken for you, always tried to put on a good face for the state of Indiana. All of a sudden, some of you people think I'm a bad guy?

I would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.

I was born with Spina bifida. That's where you have a hole in your spine, and your nerve endings come out.

I've just been fortunate to havehad a lot of hit records, though Human Wheels doesn't qualify as a hit record-but it's really the best single I've ever had.

As I get older, I have a different look on life. I just try to be a little more tolerant and a little bit more centered about what's going on around me and not so emotional.

Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, 'Okay, here's another great record by Bob Dylan; here's another great record by Led Zeppelin.'

I have to say when a man lives for himself, it's hard to live with him. That's pretty much the story of all my divorces. I've been making records since I was 22 and done things my way, and it's hard for me to compromise. And of course, to have a successful relationship, one has to compromise. Sometimes I'm not good at it.

I think Roosevelt had four terms, didn't he? I think we should go back to that, and we should go back to four years for a senator, four years for a congressman, and I think we'd see a huge change in our society.

I want my paintings to look like they were found in a garage. If they get a scratch or a hole in them, it just becomes part of the painting.

What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.

A painting has to be beautiful. Even in its grotesqueness.

When I wrote 'Pink Houses,' nobody was talking about that, right? The next thing I know, you can't see the TV without hearing commercials with 'Listen to the heartbeat of America,' or 'Born the American way.' That whole America thing now - I hate it.

One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

Life should never be viewed from the vantage point of achievements. It is total folly.

I ended up writing songs and growing up in public with my songwriting. And it's a good thing for me back then: in the early '70s, there was a thing called artist development, where an artist could find his feet, find himself, find his voice. I think I made five or six albums before I sold five or six albums.

If I'm painting, I paint every day. I'll be up in the studio from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.

Broadway is a very different kind of place. It's kind of like Nashville in that there's a certain amount of people that are involved, and those people are what run it.

American folk songs were about tragedy, right? They were about suffering and tragedy, and a lot of my songs are about that, even though they were misunderstood.

It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news.

I couldn't have recorded this record 15 years ago. My voice didn't have the depth to pull these songs off.

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

Regret should be handled swiftly, and you shouldn't hold onto it. People spend their entire lives regretting what they didn't do and what they should've done. Hey, man, you did what you did.

I went to New York in 1974, to either try to get a record deal, get into the New York Art Student League, or be a dancer. So that was my plan. Some plan. And I had no money.

I'm using my art to comment on what I see. You don't have to agree with it.

Everything I have is for sale. Material items are just things that pass through your hands that mean very little or nothing.

I want to sell to people my own age, because that's the way I write songs.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

People in Indiana have known me for 25 years. They've known George Bush four.

I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?

In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.

I've been around so many people for so long that I take great delight in my own company.

When people are afraid, they make emotional decisions.

We could walk 3 minutes and be on the beach. I think the music kind of suffered because of it. It kind of smelled like Jimmy Buffett, which is a bad thing.

I thought I knew a lot about music. Then you start digging and the deeper you go, the more there is.

I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles.

I'm your average Joe guy. I don't really care for politicians.

If fans are going to turn on me because of this, they weren't my fans anyway. I couldn't betray a whole 25 years of record making and not do this. I had to.

People have the right to say what they want to.

This is about black people selling out other black people.

This is not a rock opera. This is not Tommy. I can write songs that emote, and that's it.

What's the difference? One guy's the same as the other.

When politicians use fear, they are playing into the enemy's hand.

All I'm doing is painting. It's my hobby. And that's that.

We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at.

I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.