The truth is a rabbit in a bramble patch. All you can do is circle around and say it's somewhere in there.

I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring - just chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear.

The American Indians were Communists. They were. Every anthropologist will tell you they were Communists. No rich, no poor. If somebody needed something the community chipped in.

Did you ever want something really bad and then when you finally got it all you could do was stand there and grin at it?

If I had an axe on the evening at Newport when [Dylan] broke out the electric guitar, I'd have cut his cable.

Like most teachers, I'm just another sower of seeds.

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!