Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.

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

People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.

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 just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.

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