Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The planet is alive, and it's a woman.
Blues and jazz are such a root to music.
Actually, I'm the Scottish Woody Guthrie.
My father brought me up to be a socialist.
The Faces are my old chums. We used to hang out.
If you have a loved one, you can survive anything.
Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.
I meditate every day and do some hatha yoga every day.
A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!
I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down.
I learned that if you wait long enough, you just grow older.
I regard myself as an international man, a citizen of the earth.
I've been vegetarian for many years and only eat fish if I have to.
Rock and jazz came together in a very powerful way on 'Barabajagal.'
Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it.
Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension.
In the 1960s, I was convinced that the world was extremely mentally ill.
The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness.
I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.
There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.
In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.
I feel strongly that having a disability in one area makes you explore others instead.
My guitar-playing always included bass lines, melody lines, and rhythm-guitar grooves.
I became a recluse many times and enjoyed a private life I didn't have during the '60s.
The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.
I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.
A young person coming up and saying, 'I absolutely love your music,' is very encouraging.
With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.
Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.
Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.
I can't save the world, but if I can share some ideas, people might be able to save themselves.
The audiences used to say, 'Are you a Donovan fan or a Dylan fan?' It was all very naive, really.
I went to America not for fame or fortune but to be able to communicate with the biggest audience.
I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.
Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.
The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.
I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.
Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't sit down to write like you'd sit down to make a pair of boots.
Linda's in all the songs. 'Sunshine Superman,' 'Hampstead Incident,' 'Young Girl Blues'... Linda's the muse.
In my time, we didn't know songs could last. All we ever thought of was next Tuesday. You never imagined a future.
All of us '60s pop stars came from old cities which had a jazz club, a folk club, a coffee house, and an art school.
Meditation is certainly not a religion, cult, or spiritual path: it's actually a very basic practice to reduce stress.
I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.
On the outskirts of the desert in Yemen, there was a cafe with a jukebox that had 'Sunshine Superman' on it. I loved that.
The similarity between my music and The Beatles' music is it has within it a very positive quality. It's woven with humor.
After having polio, my right leg was weaker, so I wasn't great at football. But I swam lots and even did long-distance running.
Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.
I never considered myself an entertainer. I always felt I had to be connected to something meaningful, or it wasn't worth doing.
Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.
I went on the Andy Williams show, the Smothers Brothers show, and maybe I shouldn't have. But regrets - I don't think I have any.