Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't do live things.
The missing links in my life's work, no less!
What hurts people a lot is taking humiliation.
On the whole, I tend not to listen to my peers.
I'm just a very primitive, infantile folk singer.
I have never felt in tune with the whole rock industry.
The most effective instruments do have a vocal quality.
There's no field of music which doesn't have good ideas.
The United States is a country where everybody can start again.
Being big and famous doesn't get you more freedom, it gets you less.
I prefer the mystic clouds of nostalgia to the real thing, to be honest.
I do think there are deep structural things that are wrong in the world.
People who had empires, unfortunately, want them back eventually, somehow, someway.
What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.
I don't want to be a professional cripple. And I don't see the suicide stuff as tragic.
Anybody who thinks pop music's easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn't.
The things that I draw on, and the world that I feel part of, aren't particularly youth culture.
In the past, so many of my records, really, have been sketches for records that never really got made.
I was a latecomer to politics. Maybe I'm just very slow. I got to everything when everyone else had left.
I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
I consider myself a sit-down comedian really, as much as anything else. I love comedy. Life is a cosmic joke.
I'm not full of malice, but I do dislike Neil Diamond a lot, and I'm sorry that I've done a Neil Diamond song.
I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.
When I'm singing I try not be a singer with a capital S. I just try to get it out so I feel comfortable with it.
I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.
What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.
We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.
In theory, I'd like to work in a group. But the group I'd like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.
Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
This constant pressure from record companies to come up with a hit single or something like that, I find completely tiresome.
I looked at what adults were doing and how they wanted to earn money, and I really didn't want to do that. I wanted to go away.
I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.
I know people who grow old and bitter. I want to keep making a fresh start. I don't want them to defeat me. That would be suicidal.
I think the people who did well, or are happy, in a youth industry, they define themselves out of the business after a decade or so.
I only choose musicians who I think will emerge, can emerge, with their own character, while still going along with the tune in question.
Drinking was a big help with me making music, because drinking gives you courage. But it also makes you reckless, and that's the trouble.
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.
Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.
People are quite shocked when you remind them that Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song that they recorded in their lives, as far as I know.
The cultural mix that's happened in the United States is wonderful! Funny enough, one of the most wonderful things about it is that there is no American race.
There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.
I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.
I think that pop, and to some extent rock, are like sport and fashion industry in that they're about the exuberance of youth. That's the sort of subliminal ideology.
I find it hard to take rock groups very seriously or treat them with respect. There is something absurd about these gloomy young men getting together and banging away.
My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn't ever have done in their youth.
When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.
Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.
People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?