The easiest way to get laid by a girl, or get rid of her, is to write a song about her.

I don't like greed, I don't like ignorance. I really don't like anger. But I love love.

[Calling you a] star is just a trick. It's like a straw man thing. They [people] set you up just to knock you over. It's bull. You avoid it, I avoid it.

The fact is that all the recording science and technology in the world is no substitute for a good song or for real feeling. Music is about feeling and if there isn't any genuine feeling, if the song isn't about anything that anyone gives a damn about, there's nothing you can do. All the technique that exists won't make it any good; it'll just make it technological. All the production values you add won't do anything except make it glossy.

There has never been a communism that worked. They were all dictatorships or oligarchies, every single one.

When I was 11 years old, my parents wanted me to do something besides get in trouble. So they enrolled me in sailing classes at the Sea Shell Association in Santa Barbara, Calif. From the moment I climbed into that 8-foot dinghy in 1952, I knew instinctively what to do and sensed I had done it before.

My songs emerge from my life, or wherever they do, unbidden and unplanned and completely on a schedule of their own.