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America is tough for rock music. Rock n' roll used to be the main music for the youth, and it's not so much anymore. It's hip-hop and stuff.

Rock n' roll really belongs to all America. It really doesn't belong to one city.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

I believe the American people are entitled to some straight talk when it comes to higher education funding.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

People are asking us, 'Why have you gone country?' And we say, 'Man, we were born country.' They gave us the tag 'Southern rock' years ago as a way of not saying country.

American music is a powerful ingredient in international music, and as much as it comes from within, it also comes from without.

Our obsessive focus on college schooling has blinded us to basic truths. College is a place, not a magic formula. It matters what subjects students study, and subsidies should focus on the subjects that matter the most - not to the students, but to everyone else.

Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.