I think that I work hard to make my music as a diary for new generations who find out about it years later. They can go through the history and see a trail. It's straight and narrow, you can see the growth and understand that I'm not afraid to give you honesty and be honest about anything that has to do with my story.
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.
The view that honesty is something, and even a virtue, belongs, it is true, to those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinions.
Everything that thou reprovest in another, thou must most carefully avoid in thyself.
[Lat., Omnia quae vindicaris in altero, tibi ipsi vehementer fugienda sunt.]