Quotes from Donovan

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

I can't save the world, but if I can share some ideas, people might be able to save themselves.

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.

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 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.

When I was a boy, I had a grand, big tape recorder, and I made late-night radio shows with glasses of water and funny voices. I just loved radio plays.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.

Part of being a pop star is image. I'm told by many of my female fans that I was the poster on their bedroom walls. But if I only had that - the image and the beauty and the curly locks - I would have been a 'normal' pop star, one who comes and goes after one hit record.

'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.

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.

You endure what is supposedly unbearable, and before you know it, you would have done the impossible by bearing the unbearable.

There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

Linda loves an argument, and I like to engage, too, but she knows that I'm a poet, so I will engage forever. We are in the Chinese astrology of dogs, and we are forever snapping at each other.

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

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.

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

In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.

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 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.

With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.

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

I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.