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

I don’t think anyone really says anything new.

Music is like a huge release of tension.

I don’t reinvent myself in any major way. It seems to be a slow evolution. I go back and visit certain themes that I feel strongly about and resonate with me emotionally.

If you feel like singing along, don’t.

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

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

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

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

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

Though ‘Fire and Rain’ is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience… And that’s what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some...

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.

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.

It’s probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it’s a failure.

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

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

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

I was a huge Beatles fan. We could talk about who I listened to growing up and what my sources were, but certainly the Beatles were a late, important resource for me, and I just...

Knowing when to quit is probably a very important thing, but I just am not ready.

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

Time will take your money, but money won’t buy time.

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

You have to choose whether to love yourself or not.

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

Music is my living. I enjoy selling my music.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

People have used my songs and guitar style to teach guitar for a long time.

A concert is always like a feast day to me.

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

I can take criticisms but not compliments.

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

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.

The Beatles were a phenomenon, but they were also ordinary blokes like anyone else. I was lucky enough to see that side.

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

The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.

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.

If I were to try to identify a turning point I’d say that was it – getting clean.

I think that we’re all totally isolated beings and always will be.

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

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

I know there are people who don’t like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good – they don’t bother me and when they do...

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

I’m very unstable; there’s no stability in a musician’s life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don’t know where your money’s coming from.