A Quote by Richard F. Thomas

There are some singer-songwriters who start out as poets. So someone like Leonard Cohen wrote and published poetry in the early 60s, but then started writing songs. Bob Dylan's a poet in the sense of bard, aoidos or vates.

Richard F. Thomas

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Bob Bob Dylan Dylan Early Like Out Poet Poetry Poets Published Sense Singer Singer-Songwriter Singer-songwriters Some Someone Songs Songwriters Start Started Then Writing Writing Songs Wrote

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Richard F. Thomas
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Born: 1950

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They're my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He's just really cool.

Aurora

When I started writing again, especially when I listened to French music and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, I realized that these lots talked about themselves. The greatest artists, they didn't sing; they only spoke.

Benjamin Clementine

For someone like me, who has grown up with Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, it's hard not to invest a lot of myself in what I do.

Boy George

When I discovered Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, I could explore the records that inspired me on a different level and that led me to Joni Mitchell, who is maybe my favorite of all time, and Warren Zevon. Those artists that wrote the lyrics that you try for.

Taylor Goldsmith

Sometimes I do a Dylan song and it seems to fit me so right that I figure maybe I wrote it. Dylan didn’t always do it for me as a singer, not in the early days, but then I started listening to the lyrics. That sold me.

Jimi Hendrix

I think everyone mentions Bob Dylan, but he's someone I just admire so much as a songwriter. I think people write songs, and then there's Bob Dylan songs. He's one step ahead of just everybody else.

Tom Odell

The first song I wrote and had published was titled "Just As Long As That Someone Is You". It was written in 1959, and recorded in 1965 by Jimmy Ellege. I started writing songs because I wanted something of my own to sing. I, at that time, was not aware that the songs I heard on the radio were not written by the folks singing them. I had always loved poetry, and found it easy to integrate a melody with poetry.

Mickey Newbury

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm also a big Bob Dylan fan. The songs on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - which is one of his best early albums - they grow out of some of his difficulties with Suze Rotolo, and "Hard Rain," people say it had to do with the Cuban missile crisis - probably not. He denied it. I believe him, but it certainly had to do with the time.

Cass Sunstein

When I first started singing in Paris, I sounded horrible: I was just singing to get some money to eat. And I wasn't singing my own songs: it was Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix. Eventually, when I wrote my own music, my style just came out of my own place.

Benjamin Clementine

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

Steve Martin

We didn't have the phrase 'style icon' when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets - I liked how they dressed - and Catholic school boys.

Patti Smith

[I have] my own view about [Bob] Dylan's Nobel prize. Which is, I'm firmly in the Nay camp. I do think the award is a category error, but that's not why. Not in itself. What bothers me is the perceived status of the categories. If pop lyricists were routinely considered for the prize as are authors and poets, I'd still think it mistaken, but I wouldn't much care. But I am quite certain that Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, for example, both at the very least Dylan's equals as writers, have never been in the running and never will be.

David Bennun

Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

Robert Adamson

I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Then on to all the terrific american songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. Whoever wrote and sang in the song form I have appreciated.

Tom Chapin

A Quote by Richard F. Thomas

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