“I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.”
“I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.”
“I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.”
“There is nothing so stable as change.”
“I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.”
“You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent God, the all-great God, the Almighty God, the most powerful God, the giver of life God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.”
“Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.”
“I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.”
“I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.”
“All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.”
“You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.”
“A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.”
“I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.”
“Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.”
“What good are fans? You can't eat applause for breakfast. You can't sleep with it.”
“I realize I don't do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.”
“My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.”
“The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots.”
“At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.”
“I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.”
“What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”
“Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.”
“Money doesn't talk, it swears.”
“I'm sick of giving creeps money off my soul.”
“This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.”
“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.”
“Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.”
“I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”
“Folk music is a bunch of fat people.”
“You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.”
“Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.”
“I think I have a dualistic nature.”
“It's not easy to define poetry.”
“I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.”
“I'm more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.”
“All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.”