If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you're in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you'll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction.

If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.

I choose to believe that there is good in people and that everything is a lesson. Our place on Earth is to go deeper, to somehow get wiser. To have spirit.

I've realized, you know, having turned 40, that rest is just as important as work. In fact, it's equally as important.

I think inside every rock journalist, there's somebody who wishes they had the courage to live the life that they're not, and that they're writing about. But at the same time, inside every songwriter, I guess there's a wish for happiness.

What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.

Well, everything about singing, I learned from busking. Everything I learned about songwriting, I learned from busking.