Quotes from Donovan

I have to say, post-fame was difficult because it wasn't just fame: it was super-fame of a kind that few have. It was attached to a generation's dreams, and my own personal dreams were mixed up in it, too.

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.

When the mid-'70s came around, it looked like, 'Oh-oh, here come the punks.' But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there... There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.

I think my legacy is important because my songs - perhaps more than those of any other songwriter I know - cover every movement from 1965 on, socially and artistically. If you want songs about ecology, I've got ecology songs; if you want songs about spirituality, I've got spiritual songs.

Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.

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

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.

It seems to be very clear that each new generation that comes - not only audiences but young bands as well - are very encouraged and enthused and inspired by my work.

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.

Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.

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.

My dad would always ask, 'How's the money?' but I was never interested. Millions came and went, stolen by the robbers in the music industry. But as someone said, 'You'll never be poor as long as you can pick up a guitar.'

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.

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.

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

I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down.

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.'

I feel strongly that having a disability in one area makes you explore others instead.

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.

I'm probably the most successful Celtic bard of my generation, who projected this style and this image and this casketful of magical songs all around the world.

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.

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

If you have a loved one, you can survive anything.