All songwriters are links in a chain.

One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

Edison failed ten thousand times before he perfected the modern electric lamp. The average man would have quit at the first failure. That's why there are so many average men and only one Edison.

Anybody who wants to learn everything is pretty stupid. You learn what you can.

I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.

I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.

I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos.