Bruce Cockburn

“I like to think that if it hadn't gone as well as it has, if I wasn't able to make a living off of playing music, I would still be playing the music. But, of course, I wouldn't likely have had the opportunity to travel, and a lot of the places have inspired songs.”

“'Each One Lost' I wrote the day after I got home. My week in Afghanistan was a very short trip, but it was a powerful experience.”

“I wear my shadows where they're harder to see, but they follow me everywhere. I guess that should tell me I'm travelling toward light.”

“I'm not a pacifist. I feel that there are situations where fighting is inescapable, but we don't go looking for those things.”

“If you don't keep learning and growing, you're going to stagnate.”

“It's a phobia I have. I never assume I'm going to be able to write another album after I finish one.”

“The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.”

“I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.”

“I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.”

“I remember when the idea of living to be 40 seemed absurd.”

“I've been scraping little shavings off my ration of lightAnd I've formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto itI make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cacheUnder a loose board in the floorAnd I blow across it and I send it to youAgainst those moments whenThe darkness blows under your doorIsn't that what friends are for?”

“I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.”

“'Gifts' was just a short little one-verse song that I used to close shows in the '60s.”

“The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.”

“If I try to understand what it means to be a Christian, I look at the two instructions that were given in the Bible that are paramount, and those are to love God with all your heart and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's it.”

“There was a lot more music than the size of the place would indicate.”

“I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song is, 'My name was Richard Nixon, only now I'm a girl.'”

“A sane person doesn't think war is a good idea.”

“We're confronted with great darkness as a species right now as spiritual creatures on this planet. I don't think it's hopeless, and I don't want 'You've Never Seen Everything' to make people feel hopeless. But I think we've got to call a spade a spade.”

“Since the early '80s, I've found myself in war zones in various parts of the world.”