I dont really look at myself as a role model .And I just am the way I am and if people want to look up to me,they do.By no means do I like to give...

As a teenager I was more of an anarchist, but now I want people to thrive and be harmonious.

One thing about white people is that in their videos they don’t care. They can go out in cut-up jeans and do a video, and it’ll be large.

I’m just excited to show that everything that was likable about us when we first came out is still intact, and as strong if not stronger than it was.

Music is about listening, the more you play, the more the magic spreads.

For the past 32 years, I’ve done nothing outside the entertainment business. I’ve had some real highs and some real lows, but I love the work so much that I never once thought of quitting.

That song has the full extent of my mandolin abilities; I’m not a good mandolin player at all.

I listen to archival and historic recordings. I love watching singers. I learned a lot from watching videos.

To me, when a great band is playing together, it’s amazing for me.

Andrew Wood’s death changed things for a few weeks. I probably got even heavier into drugs after that.

Well, rhythm is 90 percent of the interpretation.

Elvis was a big influence to my music, but Loretta Lynn was, as well.

I grew up in New Hampshire. My closest neighbor was a mile away. The deer and the raccoons were my friends. So I would spend time walking through the woods, looking for the most beautiful...

I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.

But it’s just been recently that Nashville has started to feel like home.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

That’s how we do it in the black community; we give back to the people who made us who we are. We never forget that.

Step outside the guidelines of the official umpires and make your own rules and your own reality.

I dropped out of high school four times between the ages of 12 to 17.

But the business side of it, as with most creative things, there is no room for business. It is about art. It’s not about marketing.

I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.

I thought the Goldmine article was real good but I do know that the discography was missing a lot of records and had some wrong information in it.

I’ve been to nudist beaches, like twice. But honestly, I just don’t want to see these people naked. Most people look better with their clothes on, and the few that don’t, look better than you,...

I like the last Scarface album a lot.

When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I...

When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.

The way I look at it you can always get better.

I don’t want to abandon one work for the other, and I don’t think I need to sacrifice anything to put my all into either one of them.

I’m still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I’d like to work on putting art programs back in schools.

It’s been pretty crazy. I’ve been in L.A. or New York or Nashville or all over the place. I got to go home for about a total of a week.

But then again in the East Coast, I think, Tupac, inspired everybody on the East Coast, everybody down south, everybody in the West Coast you know what sayin’.

You get up about 2-3 o’clock in the morning and get through about 7 or 8 and 12 hours later you start all over. That’s the worst kind of work a person can do. You...

There were so many individual styles thirty or forty years ago.

In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn’t convince other people...

I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There’s still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven’t been explained in song.

Oh, yeah. I know Dizzy. For years he’s been my buddy way, way, way back. Dizzy is one of the most astute guys and one of the most learned guys in the world and knows...

My grandfather gave me my first guitar, an old acoustic with palm trees and dancing girls painted on it.

We’ve accumulated a lot of things over the years and many things from our grandmother. Hopefully it’ll be all right. I really don’t want to cry, but I can’t help it.

The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we’re not built to eat a lot of meat.

I had to go into a studio and compose and write and press up 12 songs in 14 hours. When you’re recording a song from scratch it takes you 14 hours to do just one...

The notes are right, but if I listened they would be wrong.

When you are trying to do something when you are getting started and you are trying to make records for the first time, you want it to be the best.

The only thing I was any good at was music.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

I remember wearing overcoats, hiding in the bushes outside of Abbey Road Studios, waiting for the traffic to clear. As it did, we would drop our overcoats and run out on to the cross walk...

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

I always wanted to do something completely different.