Other people singing my songs is something that I've never been casual about. I've always been very touched by it and I always go into immediate critical suspension.

I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is.

I won't comment on what Bob Dylan said, but I will comment on his receiving the Nobel Prize, which to me is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.

What were the bodies like on the beach? Ugly and white and ruined by offices.

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armor themselves against wonder.

I kind of limp along like so many of us do in these realms. Occasionally I've felt the grace of another presence in my life. But I can't develop any kind of spiritual structure on that.