Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

I really don't like to hurt myself. I have a good understanding with all the women who have been in my life, whether I see them occasionally or not.

There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It's hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.

You five and ten cent women with nothing in your heads, I got a real gal I'm loving and Lord I'll love her 'til I'm dead.

Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radio/record player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing.

DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.