Perspective Quotes

One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.

It's all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back.

People get very thoughtful when they are in cars. I no longer care for cars. I don't collect them.

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.

I don't think people care about the mechanics of songwriting.

Samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive - because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

I think there's a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There's something transcendent about it. It's sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate.

I thought I was grounded. I thought from my kinda blue-collar outlook on life that I would call myself a grounded person. I was not. I was like a balloon flying around in the air. And as soon as our first child was born, boom - my feet came right down to the ground.

In my songs, I try to look through someone else's eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.

I think the best duets are those where there's a dialogue back and forth, and then the two singers go into a thing together.

It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.

Rap is not music, it's talking.

Texas is OK if you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it's not for outrageous people, and I was always outrageous.

Music's for grooving man, and music's not for puttin' yourself through bad changes, y'know? I mean, you don't have to go take anybody's shit, man, just to like music, y'know what I mean? You don't. So... so if you're getting' more shit than you deserve, you know what to do about it man. Y'know, it's just music. Music's... music's s'posed to be different than that.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren't going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.

What we've had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we're doing - the music.

I'd rather have ten years of superhypermost than live to be seventy sitting in some goddamn chair watching TV.

As you go through life, you've got to see the valleys as well as the peaks.