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" The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness. "
Donovan
Important
Try
Things
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" Publishers and record companies love a broken heart. "
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" 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. "
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" On the outskirts of the desert in Yemen, there was a cafe with a jukebox that had 'Sunshine Superman' on it. I loved that. "
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" My father brought me up to be a socialist. "
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Father
" 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.' "
Donovan
Need
Stronger
Place
" 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
" 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
" I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation. "
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Writing
Which
Music
" Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession. "
Donovan
Emotions
Doubt
Anger
" '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
" Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation. "
Donovan
Desperation
Inspiration
Long
" 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
" 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. "
Donovan
Music
Because
Now
" 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
" Blues and jazz are such a root to music. "
Donovan
Music
Root
Blues
" I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place. "
Donovan
Sound
Like
Trying
" The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways. "
Donovan
Write
Always
Different
" I feel strongly that having a disability in one area makes you explore others instead. "
Donovan
You
Feel
Explore
" I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17. "
Donovan
Virtuoso
Reached
Guitar
" Meditation is certainly not a religion, cult, or spiritual path: it's actually a very basic practice to reduce stress. "
Donovan
Stress
Path
Spiritual
" 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
" 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. "
Donovan
Me
Said
Someone
" There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way. "
Donovan
End
In The End
Singing
" 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. "
Donovan
Work
Man
Age
" 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. "
Donovan
Photographs
Big
Art
" In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture. "
Donovan
Circles
Poetry
Missing
" Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension. "
Donovan
Will
You
Dance
" 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
" 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