I love baseball. I'll probably end up one of those old farts who go to spring training in Florida every year and drive from game to game all day.
Back then, the business depended on bohemians. ... They needed Kristofferson and Roger Miller ..It was the tail end of something...the last Tin Pan Alley. ...and we were the night shift! They gave us keys, because they knew the best songs weren't written in daylight.... We got our keys taken away several times...me and Guy Clark.
From the moment [Bob] Dylan arrived as a songwriter, he was [so] much better than everybody else around.
I'm supposed to make people cry, but not by manipulating.
Funerals are a pagan rite. There's not any doubt about it.
When you're really bummed out, the last thing you want to hear is up-tempo and positive. And it lets you know that you're not alone, that somebody has hurt before. It works the same way with chick songs as it does with political songs. When you hear somebody singing about these things, you know that you're not alone, that somebody else is suspicious of what's going on around us in the world. So you don't feel like you're crazy, and you feel like you might be able to make a difference.
New Orleans is a unique environment.
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.
What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.
I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now and I never get tired of the view.
I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect.
The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe.
San Antonio is like a military town. It's like literally - when I was growing up there, there were five Air Force bases, plus Fort Sam Houston. I was always sort of near the military.
My son was diagnosed with autism. He's OK, he makes eye contact, but he doesn't talk. He needs eight hours a day of very intensive school, and you wouldn't even believe me if I told you how much it costs.
I'm constantly warning people that are involved in my life that I can go busk and make a living. I can make my rent in New York City in the subway, I promise, if I'm forced to.
There's a long tradition of people from the South living in New York City.
Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.
My politics were really radical when I was younger, and then I moderated like everyone else does when they start having kids.
The creative core of New York has never been native New Yorkers; it's people from all over the world.
My audience doesn't agree with me on everything, but I love my audience, because they're totally okay with us having a dialogue.
He's the real deal. Eric Taylor was one of my heroes and teachers when I started playing around Houston in the early 1970s.
Part of it is, I think, just to let people know you've got a record out there and that you're still alive requires more work than it used to, because the traditional radio, bug chains of record stores, all of that, that doesn't exist anymore.
I'm one of the few people that I know that sings better than they did 20 years ago.
Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
Politics and music don't necessarily go hand in hand. They just do for me.
