As soon as anybody does one of my songs, I rejoice. This particular case of all these great singers doing my work - the implications are very rich and the temptation to think of the outcome of these masses of the mainstream injecting my work into the marketplace, it's a very sweet speculation.

I dreamed about you baby. It was just the other night. Most of you was naked Ah, but some of you was light.

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

To keep our hearts open is probably the most urgent responsibility you have as you get older.

You were Marlon Brando, I was Steve McQueen, you were K.Y. Jelly, I was Vaseline.

When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That's about all you can do.