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" 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. "
Donovan
Running
Right
Leg
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Donovan
Me
Know
Poetry
" 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. "
Donovan
Myself
Tradition
Think
" I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down. "
Donovan
Help
Down
Something
" 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. "
Donovan
Jazz
School
Stars
" Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it. "
Donovan
Poets
Sense
About
" 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. "
Donovan
School
Myself
College
" The Beatles and I became fast friends. "
Donovan
Became
Fast
Beatles
" Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation. "
Donovan
Desperation
Inspiration
Long
" 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. "
Donovan
Say
Difficult
Different
" On the outskirts of the desert in Yemen, there was a cafe with a jukebox that had 'Sunshine Superman' on it. I loved that. "
Donovan
Cafe
Superman
Sunshine
" The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness. "
Donovan
Important
Try
Things
" I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me. "
Donovan
Finger
Hard
Me
" I became a recluse many times and enjoyed a private life I didn't have during the '60s. "
Donovan
Life
Times
Many
" I've been vegetarian for many years and only eat fish if I have to. "
Donovan
Only
Vegetarian
Years
" The Faces are my old chums. We used to hang out. "
Donovan
Faces
Hang
Out
" I went to America not for fame or fortune but to be able to communicate with the biggest audience. "
Donovan
America
Able
Audience
" '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. "
Donovan
Music
Sunshine
Poetry
" 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. "
Donovan
Generation
View
People
" 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. "
Donovan
Myself
Success
Future
" 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. "
Donovan
Path
Loneliness
Doing
" I never considered myself an entertainer. I always felt I had to be connected to something meaningful, or it wasn't worth doing. "
Donovan
Myself
Doing
Connected
" 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. "
Donovan
Me
Down
You
" 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. "
Donovan
Children
Love
Song
" The audiences used to say, 'Are you a Donovan fan or a Dylan fan?' It was all very naive, really. "
Donovan
Fan
Say
Really
" 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. "
Donovan
Art
Mother
Holiday
" Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry. "
Donovan
Folk
Who
World
" 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. "
Donovan
Everything
May
Society
" Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession. "
Donovan
Emotions
Doubt
Anger
" 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. "
Donovan
Art
Music
Style
" 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. "
Donovan
Green
Soul
Love