If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.

People say I'm such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I'm a realist.

I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.

There's very little I can sing now. When I asked my first voice teacher, who was the best one, "When will I know when to stop singing?" he said, "Your voice will tell you." And it is very, very difficult to sing now.

In other words, it is what I do in the world that matters. When I traveled for three months in the Mideast, the places I wanted to go back to were Turkey and the Gaza Strip. It has to do with what Gandhi said: he found God in the eyes of the poor. Those are the places which were so moving that they were just unbearable.

The search is in the doing.

I've been obsessed with stopping people from blowing each other's brains out since I was ten.