I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

Either I'm too sensitive, or else I'm gettin' soft

Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something - something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it.

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry

In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn't see and weren't there for, and you have to do it as if you were.

He did ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich.