That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

My love ,she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence. She doesn't have to say she's faithful, yet she's true.

I heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men and it all sounded no different to me.

I thought that he was righteous, but he's vain. Oh, somethings a telling me I wear the ball and chain.

Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.

Cop comes down the street crazy as a loon, he throws us in jail for carrying harpoons.

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.