I tell kids, don't trust the media. The media with their emphasis on fame is helping to destroy this country, helping destroy the human race. It's the plug-in drug.

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 always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do. ... If I had an address, I'd send him a birthday card saying, 'keep on going.'

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded for 13 years before they died on the same day. They asked, "How can one have prosperity without commerce? How can one have commerce without luxury? How can one have luxury without corruption? How can you have corruption without the end of the Republic?" And they really didn't know the answer.

I used to agree with Kurt Vonnegut, who said that the human race has a snowball's chance in hell of being around a hundred years from now.

I guess I've learned more from the Clearwater than anything else. All I did was help to plant a seed, and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

Any idiot can be complicated. It takes a genius to be simple.