I don't think I'm a political songwriter as much as I am just a political person. I think it's in my fabric.

The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.

We're Americans. I don't consider us to be evil, I just don't think we know any better. We're a really young culture. We're hillbillies, and the rest of the world sees us that way. I travel all over the world, and probably the only worse rednecks than us are the Australians. And they're an even younger country.

Maybe I'm not as big a star as Bruce Springsteen because I'm not as good. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I still have an audience of a certain size. I think it's one of the things I'm luckiest.

I do not believe Tony Blair was a fundamentally good man who went bad. I believe he was evil in the first place.

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.

I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view.