Quotes

[on composing for The Bears and I (1974)] Heck, I'm no Henry Mancini or Michel Legrand. I just play the guitar and write songs. I know I'm incapable of orchestrating an entire film. They just asked me to write something expressing the story about a guy who's back from Vietnam and sorta lost, who goes to an Indian village in the Northwest.

[testifying before the Senate in 1985] Let me be clear--I'm strongly opposed to censorship of any kind in our society or anywhere else in the world. I've had in my experience two encounters with this sort of censorship. My song "Rocky Mountain High" was banned from many radio stations as a drug-related song. This was obviously done by people who have never seen or been to the Rocky Mountains and also never experienced the elation, the celebration of life or the joy in living that one feels when he observes something as wondrous as the Perseid meteor shower, on a moonless, cloudless night when there are so many stars that you have a shadow from the starlight. And you're out camping with your friends, your best friends, and introducing them to one of nature's most spectacular light shows for the very first time. Obviously a clear case of misinterpretation. Mr. Chairman. What assurance have I that any national panel to review my music would make any better judgment? To my knowledge, my movie "Oh, God" was not banned in any theaters; however, some newspapers refused to print our advertisements and some theaters refused to put the name of the film in the marquis.

[testifying before the Senate in 1985] What most concerns me aside from potential legislation which might be enacted, which we've heard today is not going to be the case, is that the whole presentation made by the PMRC comes from, in my experience, a foundation of fear. The only thing we have to fear as President [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] said, is fear itself. I'm not afraid of anything. I'm not afraid of what my children might see. I'm not afraid of anything that might be shown them, or done in their presence, that would lessen my influence on them, or their opportunity to grow up and be fine, upstanding adults.