Basically I got an insight into what it really was through Alcoholics Anonymous. One day the switchboard lit up and I saw where it was all going. I saw what alcohol could do to people and I saw that it wasn't a good thing anymore. Plus I wasn't a teenager anymore myself.

[Rock 'n' roll] music started out with some cat banging a log with a couple of pieces of stick. He sent a message across a river and although the cat on the other side receiving the message didn't know the exact words, he did understand basically something about what was being communicated.

Somebody's going to hear a song that will key in a nerve or something in their experience that represents their own vision. And the next person is going to see it completely different. So even what it means to me is probably irrelevant. It's totally irrelevant. What matters is what it means to each person listening to it.

A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception.

I didn't know what some of the stuff on Astral Weeks was about until years later.

When the spirit moves me, I can do many wondrous things.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.