There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

My diminished girth in tailor phraseology was hardly conceivable even by my own friends or my respected medical adviser until I put on my former clothing over what I now wear which is a thoroughly convincing proof of the remarkable change.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm and grasp it as a whole and you thereupon have present in you the image so to speak of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

The sea the great unifier is man's only hope. Now as never before the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.