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" I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words. "

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" Songs seem to take me a long time. I don't know why; they're not especially excellent for taking so long. "

" To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself. "

" I've never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. "

" Well, for one thing, in the tradition of Zen that I've practiced, there is no prayerful worship and there is no affirmation of a deity. "

" In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress. "

" The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence. "

" Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act. "

" My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca. "

" As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one's life or one's work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now. "

" One of the reasons I'm on tour is to meet people. I consider it a reconnaissance. You know, I consider myself like in a military operation. I don't feel like a citizen. "

" We're in a world where there's famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it's very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what? "

" I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin. "

" This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can... reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah.' "

" Journalists, especially English journalists, were very cruel to me. They said I only knew three chords when I knew five! "

" Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. "

" We're always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who've closed down. And there are times in one's life when one has to close down just to regroup. "

" Torah values are the ones that inform my life. "

" Women stand for the objective world for a man. They stand for the thing that you're not and that's what you always reach for in a song. "

" I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet. "

" Some people care about their work lasting forever - I have little interest in it. "

" Success is survival. "

" If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often. "

" I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it. "

" My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room. "

" Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true. "

" I can make a couple of good sandwiches: tuna salad and chopped egg salad. And Greek bean soup. I was a cook for my old Zen master for many years. So there were two or three dishes that he liked, you know. Teriyaki salmon, a few things. "

" I have a deep tribal sense. I grew up in a synagogue that my ancestors built. I sat in the third row. My family was decent. They were good people; they were handshake people. So I never had a sense of rebellion. "

" There's always a group of songs that I'm working at. Some of them are 10 years old, and some of them are just a few weeks old. I'm always trying to adjust these songs to some position where I can bring them to completion. "

" I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability. "

" I've got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I'm very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I'm really starving. "