Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.

Some songs seem to achieve the quality of a geometric object - a ball, box, or cone - and I don't mess with 'em.

My ignorance would require a volume to itself. Between its covers would be preserved a record of the spurious model of all creation I had in my head, a prelapsarian construct, uncorrupted by the facts.

One of the beauties of working in radio is the way a whole setting can be richly evoked simply by the addition to the track of a little birdsong and a church bell in the distance.

I've written a lot of wordy, erudite, pretentious songs, but believe it or not, I'm usually doing my damnedest to resist the temptation to be overly "clever," and trying to keep things as accessible - and singable - as possible.

I'm not a visionary, but I've spent half my life drawing things Imagined, Remembered, and Observed, comparing the differences between them, and my study confirms that "the difference between night and day / is not as great as people say."

I wanted to be a poet and/or an artist, but I was very lazy (frightened of failure, I guess) and drank too much.