ROBERT HUNTER

I feel I've got 10 books in me.

I tend to write things and don't go the next step and try to get it published. I don't want to do book signings and stuff.

A song doesn't happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.

When you get ready to vote, make sure you know what you are doing.

In wickedness of pride is lost the light to understand how little grace is earned and how much given.

When I got out of the hospital, it was one of those classic things - you're looking death in the eye, and it changes you. I thought, I ought to go back on the road.

Being in a floodplain is like sitting down in a bathtub.

You who choose to lead must follow. But if you fall, you fall alone.

I got really, really sick with a spinal infection that put me in a hospital for a couple of months, and it was touch and go. I had my guitar with me, and as soon as I got well enough to play, there was nothing else to do in that hospital. The nurses would come in and request songs.

I'm not good at being lionized, and when I'm in 'Grateful Dead'-type situations, that happens.

I walk away from writing what I consider to be a good song - with a good character, a good story in it - with all I'm gonna really get out of that song. My greatest pleasure is to create it, not to record it, not to hear anyone else play it, though that can be nice too.

If you can even manage to tell exactly what a song is about, all you do is put that song in a box forever, and it loses its evocative power.

At the top of the cycle you write policies for everybody, no matter how bad, and at the bottom you cancel everybody, no matter how good. It's a manic-depressive cycle.

I wish I could have defeated it altogether, for I regard its approach to a passage as a stain upon Confederate history. It afforded, I believe, plausible ground against them for the accusation of falsehood in professing to secede from the United States Government, in part, and mainly on the plea that it was, by reason of their fear that the party in power would emancipate the negroes in defiance of the constitution…. And now it would be said we had done the very thing … without any more constitutional right than they would have had.

Don't waste the breath to save your face, When you have done your best, And even more is asked of you, Let fate decide the rest.

Counting stars by candlelight all are dim but one is bright; the spiral light of Venus rising first and shining best, from the northwest corner of a brand-new crescent moon crickets and cicadas sing a rare and different tune.

Walk out of any doorway feel your way, feel your way like the day before Maybe you'll find direction around some corner where it's been waiting to meet you.

Perhaps people don't come into their true maturity until a parent dies.

Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.

I won't slave for beggar's pay, likewise gold and jewels, but I would slave to learn the way, to sink your ship of fools.

When I was just a little young boy, Papa said Son, you'll never get far, I'll tell you the reason if you want to know, 'cause child of mine, there isn't really very far to go.

Everything you gather is just one that you can lose.

Without love in a dream it will never come true