Quotes

Music is like a huge release of tension.

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

I find it a lot healthier for me to be someplace where I can go outside in my bare feet.

Being on a boat that's moving through the water, it's so clear. Everything falls into place in terms of what's important and what's not.

People should watch out for three things: avoid a major addiction, don't get so deeply into debt that it controls your life, and don't start a family before you're ready to settle down.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

Certain things in life are more important than the usual crap that everyone strives for.

You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.

I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.

I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.

I'm trying to look at my blessings and how amazingly well against all odds things have turned out for me.

We all have to face pain, and pain makes us grow.

It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.

I collect hats. That's what you do when you're bald.

What I've always done as an entertainer is try to come up with things that people will find interesting, or compelling, or humorous.

Sobering up was responsible for breaking up my marriage. That's what it couldn't stand.

To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.

Ireland, Italy and Brazil are the most musical places for me. They're extremely musical cultures and anything you pitch they basically catch.

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you.

I'm glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it.

I don't think anyone really says anything new.

I am myself for a living. I don't animate a character.

I don't play the kind of music that works in a football stadium.

It is a process of discovery. It's being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.

If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.

I think it surprises a lot of people that I'm still around, you know, still - that I'm not pushing up daisies, as they say.

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball!

Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.

Songwriting is too mysterious and uncontrolled a process for me to direct it towards any one thing.

I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.

I enjoy selling my music. I don't enjoy selling myself.

A concert is always like a feast day to me.

If you're an addict, it controls your life and your life becomes uncontrollable. It's boring and painful, filling your system with something that makes you stare at your shoes for six hours.

I think people are isolated because of the nature of human consciousness, and they like it when they feel the connection between themselves and someone else.

It's hard to find a way forward. When you're 18 it happens in huge chunks every day, but after 20 years, growth is much more costly.

It's a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you're being autobiographical.

I'm looking forward to being able to retire from being a public figure and being able to afford to be myself!

I was in chemical jail.

I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.

I don't get into heavy political numbers because I don't find them lyrical.

I can take criticisms but not compliments.

I believe 100 percent in the power and importance of music.

I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

I started being a songwriter pretending I could do it, and it turned out I could.

I have a love-hate relationship with the Grammys because I don't see the music world as a competitive sport.

I had a very moral upbringing, and spiritual in a sort of not very specific way.

I don't read music. I don't write or read music.

I don't know much about God. But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do as well.