“America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.”

“And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.”

“And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.”

“And the live show is still our main thing.”

“And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there's the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we're gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don't have control over.”

“But audio is a component of video, so there's always been that anyway, and although we've never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don't find it that remote, you know what I mean? It's a departure of sorts, but it's like a first cousin.”

“But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.”

“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”

“Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.”

“For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.”

“I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.”

“I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.”

“I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.”

“I have one custom guitar which I play almost exclusively. I have others - sometimes you want a little texture, kind of a different sound or something.”

“I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.”

“I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.”

“I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.”

“I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.”

“I think it's too bad that everybody's decided to turn on drugs, I don't think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money's the problem. But drugs are just drugs.”

“If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.”

“I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.”

“My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n' roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.”

“So we are pretty convinced we don't want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.”

“Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.”

“The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things.”

“We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.”