Quote

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

When I was writing my autobiography, these songs came up from time to time which were important to me, and I realized that what they really represented was, they'd come from this age of shared music.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.

Writing songs was like my ticket to the world, I think.

I feel like I write songs for the future or something. Not in an arrogant way, but I feel like maybe my songs were, like, before their time or something.

Before I started writing for myself, I was writing country records, and they were coming out dope.

I had novels to write, so I wrote them.

I was a storyteller for The Band. It was never, 'Hey guys, here's a song about what happened to me.' I was always more comfortable writing fiction.