Top 30 Greil Marcus Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Greil Marcus Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I learned that when something just has to be said to mo

I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut.
Greil Marcus
I was an American Studies student at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and pretty much as a graduate student, too.
Greil Marcus
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.
Greil Marcus
When I listen to Joy Division, it doesn’t sound particularly English.
Greil Marcus
Elvis’ early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.
Greil Marcus
I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.
Greil Marcus
Perhaps the most pernicious strain of contemporary criticism says one thing before it says anything else, says it to whatever historical event or cultural happenstance is supposedly at issue: ‘You can’t fool me.’
Greil Marcus
It’s very lucky when you have an artist – whether it’s a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer – whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.
Greil Marcus
Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term ‘still’ seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.
Greil Marcus
Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don’t mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber’s film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
My ideal reader is somebody who trips over a copy of my book on the sidewalk; then they pick it up and read as they walk. Somebody who comes in knowing nothing, caring nothing, but responds to the story.
Greil Marcus
When you celebrate somebody’s bad work on the terms that define their good work, how can that artist have anything but contempt for an audience that can’t tell the good from the bad?
Greil Marcus
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.
Greil Marcus
‘Money Changes Everything’ is this terribly despairing, heartbreaking song.
Greil Marcus
My father was executive officer, which is second-in-command, on a ship called the Hull, one of three ordered into a typhoon by Admiral Halsey – an insane and sadistic decision.
Greil Marcus
I learned a long time ago that not becoming friendly with the people you write about is a way to maintain your freedom to say whatever you damn well please.
Greil Marcus
I’ve always known why I do what I do. I didn’t need to be psychoanalysed to find that out.
Greil Marcus
The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part – when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn’t know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.
Greil Marcus
Sometimes you can listen to a song all your life without hearing it.
Greil Marcus
People write memoirs – this is my take, anyway – out of a great sense of self-importance.
Greil Marcus
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.
Greil Marcus
Hearing things like ‘Wake Up’ by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats’ ‘In Love’ – that was something I wasn’t prepared for. I couldn’t hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn’t want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.
Greil Marcus
There’s never been a Van Morrison album that I haven’t immediately listened to, whether with delight or crushing disappointment.
Greil Marcus
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.’
Greil Marcus
There’s been a streak of vengeance and carnage in all of Dylan’s records except for the Christmas record, since 2001, since ‘Love and Theft.’ Particularly on ‘Modern Times’ in 2006.
Greil Marcus
If ‘Mystery Train’ is my Nixon book and ‘Lipstick Traces’ my Reagan book, ‘Invisible Republic’ is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he’d done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.
Greil Marcus
I don’t think my life itself is very interesting.
Greil Marcus
Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.
Greil Marcus
I tend not to meet the people I write about because I’m not really interested in the people I write about as people. I don’t want to know about their family life. I don’t want to know about their bad habits or their good deeds. I’m interested in their work.
Greil Marcus
I want another idea, another project, but you can’t make them up. They show up.
Greil Marcus