No. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out quite that way. At that time, everybody was euphoric that we will have a new world order, you know, a world order that does not rely on nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way. ... We still have thousands of warheads in existence. We still have more than 20 — 30 countries relying on nuclear deterrence for their own survival.

What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.

Very often I had to fight for the recognition of my ideas, particularly since, in those earlier days, I wasn’t in any prominent position where people would listen to me.

At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by.  But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work.  I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!  This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long.  Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time.  I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further.  I was convinced that from the war and everything (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.

Of course you start to question yourself and ask “Is this really the right thing?” but my gut feeling always seems to lead me in the right direction and I just knew I needed to do this.

That’s a good way of looking at it. It’s me talking to myself, reminiscing on childhood and things I was told as a kid. Just wanting to stay a certain age and not have to grow up—that’s something I’ve always been afraid of.

If you're not taking care of yourself, it's almost impossible to try to help others take care of themselves.

It’s the world that's messed up, and it’s the world’s twisted view of what beauty should be. They need to change, it’s never you.

I don't write as often as a lot of artists I know. I save [my songwriting] for a period of time, so I bank up a lot of ideas and a lot of feelings, and then, not even necessarily on purpose, it becomes an album.

This is something I still have to learn and figure out because I'm not perfect at it yet — but I've learned that just even something as simple as breathing properly can be a really nice form of meditation. Also talking to people about it. I started going to therapy, which has been really helpful just to get it out. Of course for me as a songwriter, writing helps. So does taking things a day at a time and stopping to just breathe because I'm a person who really thinks so far in advance all the time.