Quotations

«Epictetus was a peasant child born about 50 A.D. who grew up to be a well-known Stoic philosopher, ... In modern buzz-word speak, he was the inventor of 'What people think of me is none of my business.' So I got really hooked on him.»

«I wanted to dismantle any show-business pretense and take this thing straight as a human being, ... So I said, 'I'm gonna write this, and where I think I'm great, I'm gonna say it, and where I think I'm not, I'm gonna say it. And I'm gonna try to love and accept myself along the way.'»

«Don?t Get Me Started»

«I don't think it will ever be my style to take a big mallet and just ... bust the window with it, ... I have to get there in a more subtle way.»

«I am deeply saddened by the loss of my children's grandfather and my very dear friend. I loved big John with all my heart. ... Johnny Cash will, like Will Rogers, stand forever as a symbol of intelligence, creativity, compassion and common sense.»

«To me, the outsider is God, ... If you take extreme fundamentalist Muslims, who believe it's sent down from Allah that destroying the infidel is their duty, and then if you take the extreme fundamentalists on the Christian right, God got disenfranchised somewhere in that deal a long, long time ago. The minute you start saying 'I'm the only one that's right,' you have lost it, as far as I'm concerned.»

«Unfortunately, 9/11 crystallized some misconceptions that made some people unable to realize that really healthy dissent is in truth more supportive of those poor soldiers being sent to get slaughtered than this blind allegiance to a certain political regime, ... It's like the Earth is flat and we're gonna walk off the edge of it. It causes me a certain amount of dismay. I realize that Americans are innocent -- only seven percent of our population even owns a passport. But man, I'll tell you, I don't think corporate America and the political regimes meet in an innocent place, and they don't mind using the innocence of Americans in a greedy way.»

«'It's Alright, Ma' would be the prototype for that tune, I freely admit, ... When I was 12 years old, or however old I was when Bringing It All Back Home came out, I'd just skip back and forth endlessly between 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and 'It's Alright, Ma' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man,' and now my Dylan roots are showing big time.»

«and I innocently hit an electric commercial streak, writing some songs and making some music that was just an exploration of a particular moment in my creative path but struck a chord in the country part of the culture at the time. Unfortunately for me, it sent me into a bit of self-consciousness where I sort of abandoned the patience and started thinking, 'Oh, I've made money for these people, now I've got to make more money for them.' The funny thing about me is I was twisted enough that I didn't think about the money I was making for myself. I come from a lack of privilege, post-Depression era people, and we would never presume that we possessed the worthiness to strike it rich on our own. So it sent me into trying to write hits, and it's not my favorite time of my -- would you call it a legacy? -- my career. That's the point where I got self-conscious, and self-consciousness is the enemy of good art. You've got to come from the innocent, subconsciously clear place.»

«[And how did he recover the patience that allowed him to await the arrival of songs for his 21st century trio of brilliant, contemplative, philosophical and socially conscious albums?] I just walked away from [the commercial career] and let it dismantle itself, ... I bit the bullet and crossed over that threshold to the realization that I may not be a big star in this thing. Maybe my path is something else. So I just started driving my kids to school and looking out after them. I stumbled onto a fantastic woman and built a relationship and became more solid inside myself and went back to work with a different mind-set, which is to please myself, because it's the only way I can be original.»