65 Quotes by Loudon Wainwright III

I think I'm great. I mean, I might as well come out and say it. Like most people, I have an ego and I'm in show business, so you have to have kind of a healthy, conflagrated ego to a degree. On the other hand, I'm consumed, like a lot of people, with self-doubt and loathing and guilt.

I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.

If you're 28 and singing about being over the hill, you're pretending. When you're 67 and singing about it, you know what you're talking about.

Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it's blue, and there's palm trees; it's a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.

I always wanted to be an actor, even as a little kid. So I went to drama school in the late '60s at Carnegie Mellon.

I know that people don't listen to music much in the way when they'll put on a CD, sit down, have a drink or go on a car journey. People pick and choose and just listen to tracks. But when I make a record, I try to think about it as a 50 minute musical journey, so the mood is very important, as is the sequence of the songs.

I think I'm the oldest new Bob Dylan around. I predate Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbat and John Prine. I was probably the first of the new Bob Dylans.

I guess I can be surprised I'm alive. I'm taking a little better care of myself than when I was a young person. My father died when he was 63. My mother made it to 74. My grandparents, God, they were dropping like flies.

I wasn't in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.