Donovan Quotes

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I'm a teacher, but I'm really a healer.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down.

Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension.

Actually, I'm the Scottish Woody Guthrie.

I went to America not for fame or fortune but to be able to communicate with the biggest audience.

The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.

My dad would always ask, 'How's the money?' but I was never interested. Millions came and went, stolen by the robbers in the music industry. But as someone said, 'You'll never be poor as long as you can pick up a guitar.'

I get plastic nails done in the salon. When I was younger, they were stronger, but now I get my nails built up. Then I can dance over the strings. I say, 'Okay, I need four nails; I'm a guitarist.' Sometimes if I'm in a strange place, the girl says, 'Yeah, all the guys say that.'

I didn't realise that I was so accomplished on the guitar until someone said to me, 'How do you do that?' That someone was John Lennon. He asked me to teach him my technique.

Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.

Linda loves an argument, and I like to engage, too, but she knows that I'm a poet, so I will engage forever. We are in the Chinese astrology of dogs, and we are forever snapping at each other.

With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.

Meditation is certainly not a religion, cult, or spiritual path: it's actually a very basic practice to reduce stress.

Myself and The Beatles thought surely there was a way through our fame and success to bring something to our generation to help chill the future out.

It's not like me and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr hang out every week, but we keep together in promoting Transcendental Meditation.

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.

I'm probably the most successful Celtic bard of my generation, who projected this style and this image and this casketful of magical songs all around the world.

The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.

I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.

My music translates again and again to younger generations of players because I broke all the rules, and they can break all the rules now, too.

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.

I learned that if you wait long enough, you just grow older.

If you have a loved one, you can survive anything.

Celebrities can suffer a horrible loneliness even though they have millions of fans. I started doing meditations because I realized that a spiritual path was necessary.

The planet is alive, and it's a woman.

I've experimented with so many different sounds, it's difficult to say what the Donovan sound really is, but it's essentially my voice and guitars.

Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.

I meditate every day and do some hatha yoga every day.

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.

Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it.

There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.

I never considered myself an entertainer. I always felt I had to be connected to something meaningful, or it wasn't worth doing.

The Beatles and I became fast friends.

Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.

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.

It's really much more than the plastic of album covers and record sales and dollars and cents. Music is just everybody's mother. Music is the power of you.

In my time, we didn't know songs could last. All we ever thought of was next Tuesday. You never imagined a future.

I wasn't perfect, although during the '60s, I may have appeared to be. After all, I was partying away there for awhile. From age 17 to 25, I worked only on the outer man, and I did pretty well, but I needed to go back and work on the inside.

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 Faces are my old chums. We used to hang out.

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 have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.

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.

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 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.'

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.

The similarity between my music and The Beatles' music is it has within it a very positive quality. It's woven with humor.

In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.

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.

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.

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.

On the outskirts of the desert in Yemen, there was a cafe with a jukebox that had 'Sunshine Superman' on it. I loved that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I can't save the world, but if I can share some ideas, people might be able to save themselves.

The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness.

In the 1960s, I was convinced that the world was extremely mentally ill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My father brought me up to be a socialist.

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.

The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

My guitar-playing always included bass lines, melody lines, and rhythm-guitar grooves.

'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.

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

The audiences used to say, 'Are you a Donovan fan or a Dylan fan?' It was all very naive, really.

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.

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've been vegetarian for many years and only eat fish if I have to.

A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!

Linda's in all the songs. 'Sunshine Superman,' 'Hampstead Incident,' 'Young Girl Blues'... Linda's the muse.

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.

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.

I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.

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.

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.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

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.

Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.

I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

I found in Rick Rubin a kindred soul. When I visited his home and looked in his library, I saw he was reading the very same New Age books I had picked up the month before.

A young person coming up and saying, 'I absolutely love your music,' is very encouraging.

I have to say, post-fame was difficult because it wasn't just fame: it was super-fame of a kind that few have. It was attached to a generation's dreams, and my own personal dreams were mixed up in it, too.

I regard myself as an international man, a citizen of the earth.

Rock and jazz came together in a very powerful way on 'Barabajagal.'

I became a recluse many times and enjoyed a private life I didn't have during the '60s.

I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.

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