My works are the issue of simple and plain experience which is the true mistress.

There are four powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses sight, hearing, and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

I know that many will call this useless work. Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy-on experience, the mistress of their Masters.

I really started writing when I got out of the army in 1968. And went back to the post office - I had done a couple of years in there before I got drafted. So I went back there to work.

If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.

Especially when you've got your own mail route, day after day, it was an easy place to write. It was like going to a library with no books. You're afforded to just go do your job, and you don't really even have to think about it. You know you're on the right street and you're at the right house, and you're putting the mail in the right box. That's where I wrote a lot of the early songs, walking on the mail route.