You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.

Somebody else does the rigor and then I listen. I have an assistant, and my manager, and other people who hunt and find and send it to me, and then I just figure out which ones I can do justice to.

All of us are survivors, but how many of us transcend survival?

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

I think I would have had an easier time of it if I had had training much earlier. Because when I got to the training, it was in my late 30s and I already probably had every bad habit a singer could have. In fact, it still goes on. It's un-training those habits and retraining new ones - the breathing, the relaxation, the tongue, the lungs, the everything.

There's a consensus out that it's OK to kill when your government decides who to kill. If you kill inside the country you get in trouble. If you kill outside the country, right time, right season, latest enemy, you get a medal.