I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.

Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.

I'm not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.

Almost everything The Beatles did was great, and it's hard to improve on. They were our Bach. The way to get around it may be to keep it as simple as possible.

Probably the deepest use of music and of art is to create conscience.

Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.