Jackson Browne Quotes - Page 3

So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.

They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and cars.

You measure peace with guns, progress in megatons. Who's left when the war is won?

Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.

The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

Now if I seem to be afraidTo live the life that I have made in songWell it's just that I've been losing so long.

People know more about baseball players contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our childrens lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, Do you want to bring a child into this world? Thats pretty dire.

That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.

Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they're really mean to each other about who makes what.

I’m going to be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.

I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

Eleven on a scale of ten, honey, let me introduce you to my redneck friend.

Got seven women on my mind. Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, and one says she's a friend of mine.

Talk about celestial bodies.

The first to come and the last to go, working for that minimum wage.

I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs.

Into a dancer you have grown from the seeds somebody else has sown.

I followed those highway signs and I've run down those thin white lines.

So I had a couple of years of playing trumpet. I really enjoyed it, but it was not the kind of instrument you could whip out at a party. Let's face it.

Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that's not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don't know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don't have any pressure on me.

People look around you, the signs are everywhere. You've left it for somebody other than you to be the one who to care.

Say it isn't true That there always has been and always will be war Say it isn't true And apart from all the fine things that man has struggled for Say it isn't true There always has been and always will be war

Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, Id like to study piano.

I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.