It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.

Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock n' roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early work and subjected to exhaustive attack when later works were thought to be inferior. Both developed their art without so much as a nodding glance toward their peers.

That's all any of us are: amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else.

Ringo Starr may not have much of a voice, but when he sang a song on a Beatle album, it had its own special charm.

You'll find that life is still worthwhile, if you just smile.

James Taylor may be an all-American boy but he isn't Horatio Alger, and the lionizing of many rock stars by the rock press has as much to do with old fashioned rags-to-riches stories as does the straight culture's deification of its idols.