Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

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.

I was lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere, I was lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair. I looked way up my chimney hole, I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.

Mama, put my guns in the ground, I can't shoot them anymore. That long black cloud is coming down.

You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.

Every writer at the New Yorker is smarter than me.

The future for me is already a thing of the past - You were my first love and you will be my last