Quotes from Jackson Browne

Very often it's really inconvenient - who you fall in love with. You can't really control it.

So what I do, more than play any instrument - I mean, I love to play - but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it's like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.

I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.

The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that's probably my favorite thing that I've done.

I don't avoid anything. In my songs I just choose to talk about certain things, and so yeah, there are some aspects of my character and personality that don't come out.

English people are so trapped in this class paradigm.

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

No matter how close to yours another's steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you'll do alone.

I started playing the trumpet when I was about eight.

I'm sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.

I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

People know more about baseball players' contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children's lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, 'Do you want to bring a child into this world?' That's pretty dire.

You measure peace with guns, progress in megatons. Who's left when the war is won?

You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it's up to you to make something new.

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.

That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.

Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that's not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don't know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don't have any pressure on me.

Got seven women on my mind. Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, and one says she's a friend of mine.

Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they're really mean to each other about who makes what.

The first to come and the last to go, working for that minimum wage.

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.