I went to America not for fame or fortune but to be able to communicate with the biggest audience.

On the outskirts of the desert in Yemen, there was a cafe with a jukebox that had 'Sunshine Superman' on it. I loved that.

Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it.

Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.

My father brought me up to be a socialist.

'Superman' had nothing to do with the superhero or physical power. It's a reference to the book 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra,' by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the evolution of consciousness to reach a higher superman state.

The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.

All of us '60s pop stars came from old cities which had a jazz club, a folk club, a coffee house, and an art school.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

I have amassed an enormous amount of songs about every particular condition of humankind - children's songs, marriage songs, death songs, love songs, epic songs, mystical songs, songs of leaving, songs of meeting, songs of wonder. I pretty much have got a song for every occasion.

There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.

I didn't realise that I was so accomplished on the guitar until someone said to me, 'How do you do that?' That someone was John Lennon. He asked me to teach him my technique.

I went on the Andy Williams show, the Smothers Brothers show, and maybe I shouldn't have. But regrets - I don't think I have any.

I've exhibited quite a few of my photographs. I expand them digitally till they're very big. It's an art school thing, I suppose.

With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.

The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness.

Linda's in all the songs. 'Sunshine Superman,' 'Hampstead Incident,' 'Young Girl Blues'... Linda's the muse.

If you have a loved one, you can survive anything.

What I needed and actually need is a discipline of tradition, which is lacking in our civilization. Discipline of tradition and the ceremony of humbleness.

The planet is alive, and it's a woman.

In the 1960s, I was convinced that the world was extremely mentally ill.

I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.

I didn't know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.