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

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" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" The Beatles and I became fast friends. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" '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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "