I would encourage people to realize that you don't have to panic if you're not part of a mainstream, or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn't suit you, don't go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don't just sit moaning or getting drunk—I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that's going to be easier to live with when you're at the end of your life.

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

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

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

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 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.

I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.