Bob Dylan is one of the very few people in the history of popular music who you can unquestionably apply that word [genius] to.

New Orleans is a unique environment.

I'm not a Democrat; I'm something well to the left of a Democrat, but I'm just realistic about the system.

I love theater. I go all the time. It's one of the reasons I moved to New York. But I understand that I have limited range as an actor. I can only play people who talk like me.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

You make decisions, and that's what separates art from some other pop music. It doesn't mean that you can't make an embarrassing amount of money, for a borderline Marxist, doing something that you love, but it does mean that this huge pool of money that was out there when I started making records in the '80s is gone.

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.