Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.

How can you save the world you have not seen if you can't save the community you have seen?

Make the kind of music you love even if you never hear it on the air. This was the basic lesson I'd gotten from Alan [Lomax]. Alan said, Pete, look at all this great music around. You never hear it on the radio, but it's right there, great music.

We all go to different churches or no churches, we have different favorite foods, different ways of making love, different ways of doing all sorts of things, but there we're all singing together. Gives you hope.

There is an old Arabic proverb, 'When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet', so throughout the ages, people in power have liked to control music, they used to throw songwriters in jail throughout history, and were assassinated.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing good that doesn't have bad consequences and nothing bad that doesn't have good consequences.