Neil Young Quotes

I’ll never be Bob Dylan. He’s the master.

I don’t like the American media – particularly Fox.

It’s cool to go places where working people are happy.

I’m not into this judgmental, religious-right kind of thing.

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

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.

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

I was a Reagan backer. It was a shock for some people that I could agree with anything that man would say.

It’s better to burn out, than to fade away.

Studios are passe for me. I’d rather play in a garage, in a truck, or a rehearsal hall, a club, or a basement.

I have so many opinions about everything it just comes out during my music. It’s a battle for me. I try not to be preachy. That’s a real danger.

I don’t look at a knife the way I used to. I’m more aware of what it is. I think twice. This is a key finger. It’s in every chord.

As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn’t see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more.

Commitments are one of the worst things to have in the music business. They’re very annoying.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don’t subscribe to any of that. It’s all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the ’70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the ’80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the ’90s. Who‘s to say what is and isn’t a certain type of 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 totally have no other talent and I would be totally out of work if I did anything else.

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

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.

To protect our freedoms, it seems we’re going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time.

This thing called Patriot Act, through which we abdicated a lot of our civil rights to defend the country against terrorism, it’s a four-year story.

One new feature or fresh take can change everything.

I live for playing live. All my records are live, since After the Gold Rush, with the exception of Trans and the vocals on Landing on Water.

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

Something comes along and you have to jump on and do it. You can’t stop until it’s done.

The cutthroat avenues of rock ‘n’ roll, I am fed up with. I don’t want anything to do with it.

Earth is a flower and it’s pollinating.

When the punk thing came along and I heard my friends saying, I hate these people with the pins in their ears. I said, Thank God, something got their attention.

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 was just 20 years old when I wrote Broken Arrow.

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

The rockets and the satellites, spaceships that we’re creating now, we’re pollinating the universe.

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

The thing about my music is, there really is no point.

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

I just do what I do. I like to make music.

I don’t like to be labeled, to be anything. I’ve made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it’s counter-productive.

I don’t think there is one president that’s come down the line that hasn’t done something good somewhere.

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’m not into organized religion. I’m into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we’re all just part of nature.

I don’t think I’m a thorn in the industry, I’m just another part of it.

My music isn’t anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock’n’roll, and it has an urgency to it.

Live music is better.

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