Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence.

If you don't have music, you have silence. There is power in both.

If it came back I would be thrilled. I would be delighted to write more songs. I need them now because I want to make an album and I have to depend on other people's music, which I've done for years. But still, it'd be really nice to be able to sprinkle it with my own.

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

That was sheer luck that it [being immersed into folk scene] happened when my voice began to develop. I don't know exactly what would have happened if I hadn't been alive and well and really lively in the Cambridge scene. But (the folk scene) was, and I fell into it absolutely naturally in the little coffee shops, and pretty soon it was Newport and then it was an overwhelming response internationally, actually.

The hardest song to write is a protest song, a topical song with meaning.

God must have something to do with joy ... and with sadness.