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“If you can get along with one person, then it’s gotta be possible that everybody can get along with everybody. Somehow."

“If they hadn’t come smashing through my front door, no one would’ve known what example I was setting."

—on being a bad example for society

“As long as you don’t feel isolated and completely cut off from everything, you’re okay."

SONGWRITING

(see also WRITING and INVENTION)

“Songs are funny things. They wake you in the middle of the night and say, ‘I go like this.’ Once you’ve started them off, you’re not in control of them. They control you. They’re like precocious little children. ‘Now I wanna go here … Now you put this on me …’ You humor them until they come out right."

“I don’t think I write ’em, I think I receive ’em."

“Throughout the years, certain songs have screamed out, ‘I want to go onstage!’ With others, it was more like, ‘Remember me?’ And they’d get trampled."

“I’m almost to the point now, after writing songs for so many years, that there is only one song—it’s just the variations you come up with. It sometimes seemed that there was only one song, and that was ‘Satisfaction.’ ”

“I’d let the rest of the best think that I know what I’m doing. I’ll just start playing. And I’ll rely on my intuition and instinct."

“Songs do weird things. They grow as you play them over the years … The thing is just barely out of the womb and then you play it for like thirty years. You realize that was the baby you put on record, and it’s still growing every time you play it. As simple as they appear to be, there’s so many things that you learn about them. You say, ‘Ah, I wish I had put this or that on the original.’ ”

“I never think a song is finished being written just because you’ve recorded it and put it out. Now it can grow, because other people are going in to hear it. That’s when it takes on its real meaning."

“Nobody talked to me for six months because they all thought it was all about them."

—on the song “All About You”

“They think they’re God. And that’s a very bad mistake!"

—regarding the overly high self-

regard of songwriters

“Songs, to me, come through osmosis … all the best songs are basically beautiful accidents. It happens very suddenly. So it’s just a matter of recognizing it when it comes."

“To me, writing songs is like making love: You need two to write a song."

“I love it when they drip off the end of the fingers."

“My ten favorite discs? That’s the toughest question of all, like, Is there a God?"

“Songwriting is such a mystery to me as it is to anyone else. I mean, the best songs to me are the ones I write in bed. That means I don’t even have to move. The guitar’s always next to the bed, the tape recorder’s always next to the bed … that’s luxury to me!"

“I can’t write a note of music, but then neither could most of the best songwriters of the last fifty years.’’

“I go through a lot of what we call ‘vowel movement,’ when you get in front of a microphone and forget what the hell the song is supposed to be about, and just start to sing, eee, oooo, aaah … You let the vowels fit in with the track and add the consonants later, and they become the words … The song will form itself around the vowel movement. A regular vowel movement. We like that in a band."

“If you try and add a melody to a riff rather than it evolving from it, it always sounds completely false, like the melody’s been stuck on the top with a piece of cellotape."

“They usually disappear of their own accord. That’s the thing about songs—you don’t have to be scared of them dying. They keep poking you in the face."

“I don’t know. You tell me."

—when asked what the best

song is that he’s written

STAGE FRIGHT

“I think stage fright is a luxury. If you want to play to people, you know you’ll overcome it. If the idea of standing out there is going to make you sick, you’d better not do it or you’ll get ulcers. There is a bit of show-off in us all, and you’d better nurture that if you want to stand out on a stage in front of a hundred thousand people."