The reason most folksongs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, Is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, Children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, And in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up!

My last public performance for money was in 1967. For free, it was 1972, with the exception of two little one-shot, one-song things. But that's just for friends, out of friendship for the people involved, and also because it was fun.

The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines...I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them. And that's not funny....OK, well, if I say that, I might get a shock laugh, but it's not really satire.

If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here

As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean But that couldn't happen again We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen And they've hardly bothered us since then