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.

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

I played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen...

I was a functional addict.

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

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

When I cleaned up some 17 odd years ago, I felt terrible for about six months. The only thing that gave me any real relief was strenuous physical activity.

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

I have a studio in a barn at home – we rehearse there, we film there and we record there. It’s fun to hang out with my guys and see what comes out next.

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.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It’s not as if I sit down and play ‘Fire and Rain’ by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up… the energy...

I was in chemical jail.

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

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...

Americans work a long away ahead of themselves because of the size of the place. To make any impact at all you have to promote yourself with live performances ages before a release.

Once you get that two-way energy thing going, everyone benefits hugely.

One of my earliest memories was me singing ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ at the top of my voice when I was seven. I got totally carried away. My grandmother, Sarah, was in the next...

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

I think that American music, for me, it’s a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I...

If the gig’s going really well, I’m incredibly happy on stage and really feel good about my life and things.

Television news is now entertainment, and the stories are being written by the people that have a special interest in them.

There’ll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.

Photographers and reporters are mostly after me. They want to know what I read and what I’m like and I don’t really know myself, so how can I tell them?

Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.

When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It’s almost theatrical.

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

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...

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.

That’s the motivation of an artist – to seek attention of some kind.

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

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.