I stopped drinking a few years ago, and drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble. You can get away with that your 20s, but not in your 60s, and I'll be 70 next year. Life is a small space now, much more intimate. I'm not out there in the world anymore, but I'm watching.

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

I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

The United States is a country where everybody can start again.

In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.

I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.