It's kind of limiting using your intellect to write songs like Brown Sugar, isn't it? The only thing I'm really interested in is comparative religion and ancient history.

It's the thing to do, to tell all the teeny-boppers, "I dig The Beatles" and you sing a song like "Yesterday" or "Michelle". Hey, God knows, it's such a cop-out, man, both of those songs. If you go into the Library of Congress, you'll find stuff a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like "Michelle" or "Yesterday" written in Tin Pan Alley.

The bootleg records, those are outrageous. I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know . . . it's like the phone is tapped and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that's got a picture of you taken from underneath your bed and it's got a striptease-type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.

You just can't be calling us fakers and pretenders and non-creative and say we can't freestyle.

Anyone who lip-synchs in public on stage when you pay 75 pounds to see them should be shot.

When I hear something that comes from me that makes me fall down off my chair, it's not often.