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" Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers. "

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" George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him. "

" When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room. "

" I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites. "

" The big print giveth and the small print taketh away. "

" Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs. "

" Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. "

" All records are riddles, and whatever you may want people to think it's about, it may just be throwing them off. And you don't want it to get in the way of what someone else's understanding is. It's not really about anything. At the same time, it will find some meaning. "

" I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music. "

" Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name. "

" The piano has been drinking, not me. "

" I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own. "

" When you're a kid and you're trying to find your own voice, it's rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin' Wolf, because you know that you'll never achieve that. "

" I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy. "

" The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini. "

" I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M. "

" People say all kinds of things about the ingredients of songs. But you know they are a kind of magic, in the sense that they may easily include a stain on your bedroom wall... and a variety of mis-recollections. And then you name it after a girl's name that you just made up. "

" Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye. "

" Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago. "

" I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that. "

" I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much. It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive. "

" If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment. "

" You hope people are going to be listening to you after you're gone. And they like you better after you're gone. "

" I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture. "

" I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer; it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices - everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra. "

" Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream. "

" I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas. "

" But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music. "

" Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop. "

" I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox. "

" Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you. "