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I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
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Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.
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All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
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The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.
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My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.
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You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent God, the all-great God, the Almighty God, the most powerful God, the giver of life God, the creator of death. I mean, we’re hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.
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What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
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I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.
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I don’t think I’ve ever been an agnostic. I’ve always thought there’s a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there’s a world to come.
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It’s not easy to define poetry.
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I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
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I think I have a dualistic nature.
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I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.
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Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.
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You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.
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Folk music is a bunch of fat people.
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I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.
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Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.
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People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
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This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.