Sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins.

It's a little dangerous for me to get outside myself and think about how I want people to see me.

As John Adams said, all democracies will eventually self-destruct. We seem to be doing it very quickly.

More and more, I see myself as a folk musician, and someone who values context.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves

When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song. We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said I don't know that one either, Dad, and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy.

Being in Vietnam changed him [Johnny Cash] fundamentally. He was devastated when we went into Iraq.