Quotes from Greil Marcus

When I listen to Joy Division, it doesn't sound particularly English.

People write memoirs - this is my take, anyway - out of a great sense of self-importance.

I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like his movies, I like his excess, and I think he has a great capacity for empathy and it comes out more powerfully in this movie than in any of his other films, even the formal 'I'm identifying with the underdog' movies like 'Born on the Fourth of July.'

I was an American Studies student at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and pretty much as a graduate student, too.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn't logically follow one from the other, that didn't make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.

The only thing that rock & roll did not get from country and blues was a sense of consequences," the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986.

At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves.

You may bury my body, down by the highway side Babe, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone You may bury my body, ooooo, down by the highway side So my old evil spirit Can get a Greyhound bus, and ride.

Johnson remains the most emotionally committed of all blues singers;

Just as Bob Dylan's true audience may be those who came before him, those he's trying not to dishonor when he sings their songs or makes those songs into new ones, it may be his true biography is his inhabiting of other lives.

predictable Christmas standards

Elvis stopped threatening—not only girls, but the whole of the social order—and began pleading.

Every time Elvis sings, he makes a bargain with the devil -- just like Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK!

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

D. H. Lawrence's "Never trust the teller. Trust the tale" is always right.

It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.

Renee's self-possession, her ability to possess other selves, is a measure of the weakness of her husband, his inability to stop his own self from splitting in half.

Banishing the love song, people discovered what else there was to sing about.

Art doesn't explain itself.

And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way

critic Robert Ray once said, "What's interesting about rock & roll is that the truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. 'Tutti Frutti' is far more radical than Lennon's 'Woman Is the Nigger of the World,' and the sound of Bob Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did.