Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
An obsession with untold stories is a source of energy.
Sometimes you can listen to a song all your life without hearing it.
When I listen to Joy Division, it doesn't sound particularly English.
Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.
Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.
'Money Changes Everything' is this terribly despairing, heartbreaking song.
I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.
You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.
People write memoirs - this is my take, anyway - out of a great sense of self-importance.
We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail
We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.
It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.
Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.
I was an American Studies student at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and pretty much as a graduate student, too.
I think criticism, or a critical engagement with history, has a good deal to do with a willingness to be fooled.
There's never been a Van Morrison album that I haven't immediately listened to, whether with delight or crushing disappointment.
There is no pop category, let alone any infinitely gene-sliced genre name, to contain the lead in Rihanna's voice in 'Needed Me.'
No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.
When you're writing criticism or thinking critically, to draw a very limited minor conclusion from solid evidence is really not thinking.
I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.
Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice
Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.
I learned a long time ago that not becoming friendly with the people you write about is a way to maintain your freedom to say whatever you damn well please.
I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.
My father was executive officer, which is second-in-command, on a ship called the Hull, one of three ordered into a typhoon by Admiral Halsey - an insane and sadistic decision.
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.
There's been a streak of vengeance and carnage in all of Dylan's records except for the Christmas record, since 2001, since 'Love and Theft.' Particularly on 'Modern Times' in 2006.
When you celebrate somebody's bad work on the terms that define their good work, how can that artist have anything but contempt for an audience that can't tell the good from the bad?
If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.
Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.
My ideal reader is somebody who trips over a copy of my book on the sidewalk; then they pick it up and read as they walk. Somebody who comes in knowing nothing, caring nothing, but responds to the story.
Think about how rare it is for anyone to encounter a teacher who can open you up to the notion that there is an infinite amount of meaning and possibility and inspiration in the smallest thing before you.
Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft–and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.
Perhaps the most pernicious strain of contemporary criticism says one thing before it says anything else, says it to whatever historical event or cultural happenstance is supposedly at issue: 'You can't fool me.'
I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut.
I never could understand - it was impossible for me to get my head around - what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan's beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio.
Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.
I tend not to meet the people I write about because I'm not really interested in the people I write about as people. I don't want to know about their family life. I don't want to know about their bad habits or their good deeds. I'm interested in their work.
I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.
Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.
Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term 'still' seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.
Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term "still" seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.
When I'm struck by things, I want to hear more and find out more. I remember when Lana Del Rey was on 'SNL,' this supposedly disastrous performance. She's doing this pretentious torch song, and I thought, 'I don't know what she's doing, but it's really moving me.'
Buddy Holly had something very different from the other great early rock n' roll stars, whether it was Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bo Diddley. He came across as so ordinary, as such a nerd. You know, he was a big guy, and he carried a gun. He was anything but a nerd.
I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like his movies, I like his excess, and I think he has a great capacity for empathy and it comes out more powerfully in this movie than in any of his other films, even the formal 'I'm identifying with the underdog' movies like 'Born on the Fourth of July.'
I don't know that there's a division between American and British, European, South American, Asian sensibilities when it comes to rock n' roll or, really, any form of music. Songs travel, and people take them into their lives in all different kinds of unpredictable and really untraceable ways.
Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.