Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift - look out out kid, they keep it all hid - Bob Dylan

Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift

"Well, songs are just thoughts. For the moment they stop time. Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to give the illusion of stopping time. With just that thought. To hear a song is to hear someone's thought, no matter what they're describing. If you see something and you think it's important enough to describe, then that's your thought. You only think one thought at a time, so what you come up with is really what you're given. When you sit around and imagine things to do and to write and to think - that's fantasy. I've never been much into that. Anybody can fantasize. Little kids can, old people can, everybody's got the right to their own fantasies. But that's all they are. Fantasies. They're not dreams. A dream has more substance to it than a fantasy. Because fantasies are usually based on nothing, they're based on what's thrown into your imagination. But I usually have to have proof that something exists before I even want to bother to deal with it at all. It must exist, it must have happened, or the possibility of it happening must have some meaning for me.

I'm not going to write a fantasy song. Even a song like "Mr. Tambourine Man" really isn't a fantasy. There's substance to the dream. Because you've seen it, you know? In order to have a dream, there's something in front of you. You have to have seen something or have heard something for you to dream it. It becomes your dream then. Whereas a fantasy is just your imagination wandering around. I don't really look at my stuff like that. It's happened, it's been said, I've heard it: I have proof of it. I'm a messenger. I get it. It comes to me so I give it back in my particular style… It does have a literal reality. I don't think it could stand up if it didn't. Because other people can identify with it, and they know if it's true or not."

It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that moved -a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry