To sing is to praise God and the daffodils, and to praise God is to thank Him, in every note within my small range, and every color in the tones of my voice, with every look into the eyes of my audience, to thank Him. Thank you, God, for letting me be born, for giving me eyes to see the daffodils lean in the wind, all my brothers, all my sisters, for giving me ears to hear crying, legs to come running, hands to smooth damp hair, a voice to laugh with and to sing with...to sing to you and the daffodils.

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

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

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.

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

"Nasty Man" isn't a laughing matter, but you have to laugh anyway. The song, itself, becomes something of a laughing matter because we'd go crazy if we didn't keep laughing.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.