I don't think of myself as a symbol of the sixties, but I do think of myself as a symbol of following through on your beliefs.

The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence.

My dread is for my show to be a nostalgia act. So the key to it is how do we keep it fresh?

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.

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.

Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.

Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don't sit down and shut up once in a while we'll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.