Neil Young Quotes

I've always been better moving than I am standing still.

I'm always open to new stuff. I don't sit and try to figure out what to do, I just wait for an idea to come.

In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary.

There was a band playing in my head, And I felt like getting high

I'm not waiting for times to change
I want to live like a free-roaming soul
on the highway of our love.

There's a lot of people saying we'd be better off dead. I don't feel like a satan but I guess I am ... keep on rockin' the free world.

Don't think. The worst songs I've ever written happen when I think.

There's more to a picture than meets the eye.

Wooden ships are a hippie dream, capsized in excess if you know what I mean.

My songs speak for themselves. The musicians who play on them and the way they sound and where they were recorded and the way they were recorded is the old Nashville way ... they sound as country or more country than a lot of things that are on country radio ...

The person who builds a character makes foes.

Listen to your own voice. Don't listen to someone else's. To me the way to live is to always move forward - to keep searching for whatever it is that interests you.

Music lovers always want to hear the best. It's about freedom of choice, we supply the music.

I think I'm going to be making country records for as long as I can see into the future. It's much more down-home and real.

I'm free to give my love, but you're not the one I'm thinking of.

I still remember "the mighty Cros" visiting the ranch in his van. That van was a rolling laboratory that made Jack Casady's briefcase look like chicken feed. Forget I said that! Was my mic on?

Hard working people stopping for a drink on the way to work.

With Crazy Horse, it's all one big, growing, smoldering sound, and I'm part of it. It's like gliding, or some sort of natural surfing.

Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make them go away.

Rock and roll is here to stay.

Welfare mothers make better lovers.

There's two kinds of love, one is wrong and one is right.

I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn ... My songs speak for themselves.

After a few months, I decided to do one more leg of the Le Noise tour and film the last show with Jonathan Demme in Toronto's Massey Hall/ It turned out to be a great night. Everyone was very happy because we had captured it. During a review of the digital files, we realized that the resolution was not full, it was a stepped down quality, not the best it could be. My own team's excuses were not adequate, because I was not informed of the decision to go to a lesser quality. Lesser quality is so accepted as normal now that even I had used it unknowingly. I went back to Massey Hall and set up a PA system like the one I used at the show, played back the mixes through the PA, and rerecorded the house sound at the highest resolution. I did the best I could with a bad situation. It does sound great now. Thankfully, the PA mix was only one step down from the highest resolution, so when it resonated in the hall and was rerecorded at the highest level, a high resolution hall sound was captured.

In the end, the record companies have the power to control the quality that is served online. Online service has been problematic in that it actively or discreetly promotes trading and duplication of music. It is not offensive to me that the MP3-quaility sound is traded around. It is, in my opinion, the new radio and serves a great purpose: making music lovers away of the content tat is out there to buy. If the consumers want it, let tham take it, whatever quality they prefer. Ultimately, nothing can stop absolute quality from making a big comeback. The stage is well set. I believe in what I am trying to do and that good Karma will come from it.
It is just a matter of time.

Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.

I don't like the current political system in the USA and some other countries. Increasingly, democracy has been hijacked by corporate interests.

Shelter me from the powder and the finger
Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger
Think of me as one you'd never figured
Would fade away so young
With so much left undone
Remember me to my love,
I know I'll miss her.

I feel like I could be likened to an old hound circling on a rug for the last five years.

Most people think it's the other way around: that time is going faster and we're doing less. But really time seems to be going faster because we're cramming so much into it.

When people start asking you to do the same thing over and over again, that's when you know you're way too close to something that you don't want to be near.

Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.

Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar,
Dancing on the light from star to star.
Far across the moonbeam I know that's who you are,
I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire.
I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream,
You could have been anyone to me.
Before that moment you touched my lips
That perfect feeling when time just slips
Away between us on our foggy trip.

I see a woman in the night with a baby in her hand, under an old street light near a garbage can.

It's a robust time, probably the most fertile time for the underground and for revolution since Nixon. I'm not talking about political overthrow; I'm talking about just general cultural revolution. Bush has polarised the country and is creating this breeding ground for an opposition. In the next couple of months, they'll probably make it unpatriotic to be Democrat. It's pretty crazy.

I have a friend
I've never seen
He hides his head
inside a dream
Someone should call him
and see if he can come out.
Try to lose
the down that he's found.

But only love
can break your heart
Try to be sure
right from the start
Yes only love
can break your heart
What if your world
should fall apart?

Bad news is just an excuse.

I've seen the needle
And the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie's
Like a settin' sun.

Like a mountain that's growing.

There's an edge to real rock 'n' roll. It's all that matters.

I was not doing what I was told to do. And they sued me for making music "uncharacteristic of Neil Young." That was Geffen Rocords' biggeest mistake, I think. The mistakes all started when I caved and didn't give them Island in the Sun. They wanted me to be commercially successful, and I wanted to be an artist expressing myself-those two goals are not always compatible. I was expecting to have the same artistic freedom that I had at Asylum Records, but Geffen Records wanted me to be a smash, selling millions of records. Most important, Geffen was not a hands-on at Geffen Records. He had other people doing that. It showed.

I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun. There were children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones.

The punches came fast and hard, lying on my back in the school yard.

Imagination is my best friend.

The '60s was one of the first times the power of music was used by a generation to bind them together.

Down by the river, I shot my baby dead.

I think in some ways - only in some ways - but in some ways, rock and roll has let me down. It really doesn't leave you a way to grow old gracefully and continue to work.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

The true martial artist yields to the weak, while withstanding the strong.

Link Wray ... He was the beginning of Grunge, way before anybody you know.

I can get away with saying a lot of ideas that are young and naive. I'm liberated.

Let's roll for justice, let's roll for truth. Let's not let our children grow up fearful in their youth.

I want to live, I want to give, I've been a miner for a heart of gold.

Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways or trade away our children's days.

Long, flat expanses of professionalism bother me. I'd rather have a band that could explode at any time.

I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

I never knew a man could tell so many lies, he had a different story for every set of eyes. How can he remember who he's talking to?

As soon as you start preaching, nobody wants to hear you because then you're a jerk.

As you go through life, you've got to see the valleys as well as the peaks.

When we were strangers, I liked you from afar
when we were lovers, I loved you with all my heart

Some people put down all presidents. If you say anything good about any of them, they think you're supporting everything they do.

If you follow every dream, you might get lost.

Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently. Danny was every bit the artist I am, but he died of a heroin OD in the early seventies. Every time I hear Pegi sing that song, it makes me tremendously sad. She sings it so beautifully, phrasing it to break my heart. She does it justice. You can see I have some unfinished business with Danny.

I see country music, I see people who take care of their own. You've got 75 year-old guys on the road. That's what I was put here to do, y'know, so I wanna make sure I surround myself with people who are gonna take care of me. 'Cause I'm in it for the long run.

As important as the funds are, the vision is the greatest gift.

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

I have a lot faith in the younger generation of music lovers. Youth isn't living in the past; if somebody tells them that there's something better than what they have, they're going to check it out. And if they like it, they're going to get it. I'm not worried about the youth. Young people aren't just looking back, they are also looking forward.

When the album was done I loved it. It was a mixture of electric and acoustic solo performances with dubs. I called it Le Noise, after Dan. It was a French Canadian joke, a very English was of saying Lanois. I was doing a show that introduced a lot of the songs, and things were going great. I was very happy.

It doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to you.

I always try to get behind the guy steering the ship. That's the kind of guy I am.

Are you negative in a world that never stops turning on you?

And you can't get away from a mirror if you stand in front of it all the time, right. But if you step away from it, you don't notice it any more. And that's what the stage is like for me. See, an image becomes meaningless in as much as it's always temporary.

I like to play with people who can play simple and are not threatened by other musicians thinking they can't play. And that eliminates 99 percent of the musicians.

My archive project is a multiedged sword. It is something I love doing, but it raises some questions about my motives in doing it. A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don't believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It's my life, and I am a collector. I collect everything: cars, trains, manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, records, memories and clothes, to name a few. The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years.

I'll go for things that I know are going to be wrong, with a vengeance

In the fields of opportunity it's plowing time again.

There is some blogging jerk out there who feels he can generalize his way to validity.

I don't have to perform to stay in the public eye anymore. I really don't. I am who I am and what I do on musical stage these days really makes no difference at all. I already have all the momentum there. I am only doing it because I love to do it.

Got to fight to control the violent side, every day and night.

An idea discovered is much better possessed.

Our educational system basically strives for normal-which is too bad. Sometimes the exceptional is classified as abnormal and pushed aside.

Love is a healer and I love you.

Rock and Roll can never die.

When you're young, you don't have any experience - you're charged up, but you're out of control. And if you're old and you're not charged up, then all you have is memories. But if you're charged and stimulated by what's going on around you, and you also have experience, you know what to appreciate and what to pass by.

I got religion in the airport, my Lord. They caught me waiting on my baggage when I was bored.

You gotta keep changing. Shirts, old ladies, whatever.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Nothing is perfect in God's perfect plan.

In a Ramada Inn near the grapevine, they stop to rest for the night. Traveling down south, looking for good times. Visiting old friends feels right.

Every wave is new until it breaks.

This old world keeps spinnin' round; It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down.

I lit a fire and sat there in my rocking chair. We lit a candle for him. It was as simple as that. I knew that what I had done may have been a catalyst in Danny's death, but I also knew that there was really nothing else I could have done. I can never really lose that feeling. I wasn't guilty, but I felt responsible in a way. It's part of what I do. Managing the band and taking care of the music is very painful at times. It's a sad story. A moment I will never forget, years I can never replace, music the world will never hear, all gone in the turning of a second.

I have no idea who's steering, and I don't really care .. I just keep going whatever the inclination is ... there are threads that are continuous and hold everything together and a major thread is country music ...

It's a blue album, but it's not a blues album. I'm not pretending all of a sudden now I'm blues.

I get into each thing I do, to the point where nothing else matters. I guess I'm an extremist.

Sailing heart-ships through broken harbors out on the waves of the night, still the searcher must ride the dark horse racing alone in his fright.

It's better to burn out than it is to rust.

WE have to take care of this world. WE can't wait any longer. WE need to stop using fossil fuels. Get behind the green new deal. WE are running out of time. Stop being distracted by reality TV shows in the White House. Climate Change is what Reality looks like.
The mud slides are coming. The rain is coming. The timing is all off. The rain could have saved California. Now it is coming to bury the things we've done. This is what you and I are leaving our kids. Wake up. Love one another. Save one another. The Earth is talking to us. LOVE.
- more at the neil young archives website

Love is a rose
But you better not pick it.
It only grows
When it's on the vine.
Handful of thorns
And you'll know you missed it.
You lose your love
When you say the word MINE.

Steve Jobs was a digital pioneer, but when he went home, he listened to vinyl.