Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.

I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.

Love is blind. My politics has been, too. I think you can fall in love with ideas, and you can fall in love with people. It's a very subjective experience. And I'm loyal to that experience.

I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.

Because of my politics, people think I'm anti-American. But I was quite the reverse. What I don't like about the United States is when the government acts like an old, imperial 18th- or 19th-century European power.

It just doesnt mean anything to me, the high-profile, big money side of things. I just want enough to live on, and to be able to get on with what I do, and hang around my friends.

There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.