Classic Quotes Collection

My big fear was that my guitar would go out of tune.

People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.

You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.

Without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp.

I wanna say hello to all the ex-hippies tonight. I've never been a hippie myself but I'm an honorary hippie.

My style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.

Sometimes people ask songwriters what a song means, not realizing if they had more words to explain it they would've used them in the song.

I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see Creation just about everywhere. The highest form of song is prayer. King David's, Solomon's, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the Earth.

The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life.

She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid's arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.

Reality has too many heads.

The purpose of art is to stop time.

I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio.

If love is a sin, then beauty is a crime.

DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.

I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

A song is like a dream, and you have to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter. You can write a song anywhere, in a railroad compartment, on a boat, on horseback -- it helps to be moving. Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving.

A BIG PART OF SONGWRITING, like all writing, is editing-distilling thought down to essentials. Novice writers often hide behind filigree. In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid. As the old saying goes, an iceberg moves gracefully because most of it is beneath the surface.

The world don't need any more songs... As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer for it... There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated... Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgment, little affirmation, but sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence.