Great Throughts Treasury

"If I'm taking a picture of Brancusi's grave, I know that there's something of him, of his mortal remains, beneath my feet, and there's something beautiful about that."

"If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer."

"If your label won't let you have the cover you want or sing the songs you want, then leave!"

"If I've learned one thing in life, it's not to be so judgmental of other people."

"I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not."

"I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar."

"I'm a worker. I do the work to communicate, and I want people to embrace it, and when they do I'm happy."

"I'm not a very analytical person."

"I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business."

"In 1974, when I started working with the material that became 'Horses,' a lot of our great voices had died. We'd lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X."

"I'm not really a nostalgic person."

"I'm not afraid of terrorism at all. I'm afraid of loss of our freedom, loss of mobility, loss of global comradeship."

"In both cases, we're pleased to have resolved them."

"In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one?s work caged in art?s great zoos ? the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination."

"In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter."

"It walked up to me and I took off running and went and called my father and said you've got to see this and help me."

"In the '70s, I had a very romantic idea about being out in the world and having a network of people working with me. I thought of it more as a military regiment."

"In the period where I had to live the life of a citizen - a life where, like everybody else, I did tons of laundry and cleaned toilet bowls, changed hundreds of diapers and nursed children - I learned a lot."

"It came, I felt, too easy. Nothing had come to Robert so easily. Or for the poets I embraced. I decided to back off. I turned down the record contract? I thought of something I had learnt from hearing Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz. Crazy Horse believes that he will be victorious in battle, but if he stops to take spoils from the battle field, he will be defeated? I tried to apply this lesson to the things at hand, careful not to take spoils that were not rightfully mine."

"It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly."

"It was an answered prayer. The best Easter present I could ask for. When we dropped him off August 21st my prayer was 'God, please bring him back in one piece' and today my prayer was answered."

"It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me."

"It was no hardship to me to spend long hours reading and writing."

"It would go back and forth between the two of us and then it would go over here and bang its head on the steps trying to break the glass off."

"It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies"

"It's not that I have compromised or anything, but it's always been important to me to take good care of myself and be a good example. I'm not much a role model in terms of hair care, though."

"I've always believed in having a sense of balance and stealth."

"I've always thrived on the encouragement of others."

"I've always looked the same. Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that's what I wanted to wear every day."

"It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all."

"I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides."

"I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss."

"Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil."

"I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it."

"Laughter. An important material in order to survive. And we were laughing often."

"Let's just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty."

"Love is an angel disguised as lust."

"Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris."

"Mohammed personally mapped out seven heavens. If he got to seven, you know there's more."

"Mom passing in front of shop windows, kicking him why people ask that I remember breaking glass. My mother, that enables people to live together, a team that into words had mentioned the existence of the rules of social behavior. When I heard that everything before us, and the road map by determining removed due to live in a world where I felt restricted. Disruptive pressing my motives, I trained myself to concentrate on the creative ones. Nevertheless, rule-hating side I was not totally dead."

"My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games."

"More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing."

"My bowels are empty, excreting my soul. What more can I give you?"

"Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too."

"Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artist. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him."

"My mom loved rock 'n roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around."

"My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets."

"My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer."

"My mother answers all my fan mail."

"My mother and father had so many ups and downs and stayed with each other and helped each other. My mother took in ironing and she was a waitress. My father was working in the factory and he did people's tax returns."