Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Donovan
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Scottish musician Donovan.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
On the outskirts of the desert in Yemen, there was a cafe with a jukebox that had 'Sunshine Superman' on it. I loved that.
What I needed and actually need is a discipline of tradition, which is lacking in our civilization. Discipline of tradition and the ceremony of humbleness.
The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.
Before, it had been fame, and then super-fame came. And then it became super-super-fame. One loses one's personal life, really; you're recognized everywhere. But I embraced that.
I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down.
When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He'd studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.
In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.
I can't save the world, but if I can share some ideas, people might be able to save themselves.
The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.
When I was a boy, I had a grand, big tape recorder, and I made late-night radio shows with glasses of water and funny voices. I just loved radio plays.
I've exhibited quite a few of my photographs. I expand them digitally till they're very big. It's an art school thing, I suppose.
In 1968, I bought a 114-foot yacht, built in 1946, and lived on the Greek islands for a while. We had an extraordinary time in it. Then I gave it to The Beatles.
In the 1960s, I was convinced that the world was extremely mentally ill.
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.
I have amassed an enormous amount of songs about every particular condition of humankind - children's songs, marriage songs, death songs, love songs, epic songs, mystical songs, songs of leaving, songs of meeting, songs of wonder. I pretty much have got a song for every occasion.
Linda's in all the songs. 'Sunshine Superman,' 'Hampstead Incident,' 'Young Girl Blues'... Linda's the muse.
I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.
My father brought me up to be a socialist.
The 'Bohemian Manifesto' represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.
The way I sing my songs leads the listener into a place of introspection, a state of mind that can trigger self-healing and the kind of profound rest you cannot get from sleep alone.
Part of being a pop star is image. I'm told by many of my female fans that I was the poster on their bedroom walls. But if I only had that - the image and the beauty and the curly locks - I would have been a 'normal' pop star, one who comes and goes after one hit record.
Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.
The poet is the voice of the people. And when the poet presents certain ideas, two phrases in one poem can alter a generation's view. So poets have always been feared - and controlled and jailed.
I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.
I never considered myself an entertainer. I always felt I had to be connected to something meaningful, or it wasn't worth doing.
Meditation is certainly not a religion, cult, or spiritual path: it's actually a very basic practice to reduce stress.
Coming from art school, I had a great sense of style - as did The Beatles and the Stones - and I enjoyed projecting that. Image, attitude, great music and great lyrics - that was the '60s.
When the mid-'70s came around, it looked like, 'Oh-oh, here come the punks.' But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there... There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.
My guitar-playing always included bass lines, melody lines, and rhythm-guitar grooves.
Society may shun bohemia, may put it down, may consider it useless and ineffective, but it is where everything cooks and boils and is created.
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.
The Faces are my old chums. We used to hang out.
I think my legacy is important because my songs - perhaps more than those of any other songwriter I know - cover every movement from 1965 on, socially and artistically. If you want songs about ecology, I've got ecology songs; if you want songs about spirituality, I've got spiritual songs.
My particular space has always been quite unique in popular music. I have a background in R&B and hard rock and straight pop, but I never went all the way with any of those genres.
Honors and awards are very interesting, and I truly accept them. I have very high regard for what they mean. What they mean is that they're pointing to the work.
I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.
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.
I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences - what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.
'Superman' had nothing to do with the superhero or physical power. It's a reference to the book 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra,' by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the evolution of consciousness to reach a higher superman state.
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.
My father was a part of that generation, and my mother, too - the late-'30s, early-'40s big-band generation. Frank Sinatra, Art Blakey, Gene Krupa, Billie Holiday - all that stuff was in my background.
Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.
I'm in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Jimmy Page gave me the MOJO Maverick award. I got an Ivor Novella Award for my very first song.
In England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism.
I've been vegetarian for many years and only eat fish if I have to.
A man always has to leave his homeland, go to another time zone, another culture, to get a different recognition - to be accepted as someone who's following a different path, who's moving into a different mode.
It seems to be very clear that each new generation that comes - not only audiences but young bands as well - are very encouraged and enthused and inspired by my work.
I didn't know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
'Sunshine Superman' was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.
I already had top 10 records before 'Sunshine Superman,' with 'Catch the Wind' and 'Colors,' but this was a real breakthrough for me. It was a consciousness change for songwriting, as people are now saying I initiated the psychedelic revolution with this album, 'Sunshine Superman.'
Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.
The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness.
The similarity between my music and The Beatles' music is it has within it a very positive quality. It's woven with humor.
I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.
The audiences used to say, 'Are you a Donovan fan or a Dylan fan?' It was all very naive, really.
A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!
If you have a loved one, you can survive anything.
Having had polio never held me back as I got older. Although having one leg smaller than the other isn't much fun, I could always get about without any trouble. Luckily, in the music industry, everyone was only interested in my singing and playing and not the size of my legs.
I feel strongly that having a disability in one area makes you explore others instead.
I first met Linda Lawrence in March 1965 in the green room of 'Ready Steady Go!,' the British pop TV show. Linda was a friend of one of the co-hosts. She had an art-school vibe, and after a brief conversation, I asked her to dance to a soul record playing. As we jazz danced, I fell in love.
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