Experience Quotes

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.

To meet Roosevelt with all his buoyant sparkle, his iridescence, was like opening a bottle of champagne.

For the first time I heard shots fired in anger, heard bullets strike flesh or whistle through the air.

Whatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly foundations. No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

I can do Jumpin' Jack Flash in the bath at midnight, on my head. I don't need to rehearse to do that, I really don't.

When you're young and everything dramatic is exciting, you start to believe that hype that, in order to be an artist, you have to suffer. I've graduated from that school.

I grew up in Chicago, but I spent a lot of time down in Kentucky, and Kentucky was about 20 years behind the life that was in Chicago.

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.

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.

I knew Fred since I was 14 and was first going to the Old Town School, Fred used to work part-time in the store. Every time I wrote a song Fred would turn on his really good high-class tape recorder, reel-to-reel, and record it. So he's got recordings of me on guitar singing all my songs in his apartment long before I ever recorded for a recording company. I never found out what happened to the tapes.

Even when I was a mailman. That job required no great skill, so once you got it down, you had a lot of free time to daydream and make up songs.

I recognize that as a musician there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, "I spent my time learning how to play. You didn't spend time learning how to play, therefore, you are not a musician."

Singing, it's like it's like loving somebody, it's a supreme emotional and physical experience.

I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they'd never seen one and neither had I.

When you're young, you don't have any experience-you're charged up, but you're out of control. And if you're old and you're not charged up, then all you have is memories. But if you're charged and stimulated by what's going on around you, and you also have experience, you know what to appreciate and what to pass by.

As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn't see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more.

I still remember "the mighty Cros" [David Crosby] visiting the ranch in his van. That van was a rolling laboratory that made Jack Casady's briefcase look like chicken feed. Forget I said that! Was my mike on?

I was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.

With Crazy Horse, it's all one big, growing, smoldering sound, and I'm part of it. It's like gliding, or some sort of natural surfing.

Little moments attach themselves to other little moments and collect into big dreams. We become what we experience.