Jackson Browne Quotes

I'll talk all this craziness in my music, but when I have your attention, and you're listening to me, I'll talk about what I want to talk about and what I think we need to address.

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems

It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them.

I don't set out to write a political song. I am not one of those that feels compelled to write about what's going on.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.

I make films to explore concepts and raise questions, not tell the audience what to think.

In the entertainment industry all that anybody wants to do whether it's music or stories or dancing or comedy or whatever, they want to entertain the public. And they do it any way they can. Sometimes they concentrate simply on entertaining people and they don't care what message they are giving.

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

If you come across an American artist right now who has no political opinions or is afraid of talking politics, be very concerned.

When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, "You should not do that, you should do this." They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business. I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart.

Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.

I adhere to the philosophy, "I don't care who writes the laws, let me write the songs."

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you're doing something.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don't know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn't responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I'm just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

I think as much as possible, an artist, if he has any kind of social or political concern, has to…expose as much as possible what he sees so that some people think about things that they don’t normally think about… [Art] should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.

If you're a writer, you want to get your soul out there, where people can look at it.

It's people who write music because they are obsessed that I like; because they have something to say and no other way to say it.

Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.