Top 33 Dan Hill Quotes

While certainly no pressing threat to Gordon Lightfoot, I knew it was simply a matter of time until I was going to be a star.

Let’s face it: pop music in its myriad permutations will always be sexually presumptuous, racially controversial and, frequently, politically charged.

In the music world, concerts unfold strictly according to plan. But, as I’d been finding out, in the book world, things keep changing by the second.

Ringside seats mean you hear the breaking of ribs, the splattered cartilage of what was once the boxer’s nose, the dislocation of the jaw, the horrifying ‘ugggh’ that the boxer utters milliseconds after receiving a crushing left hook to the solar plexus or kidneys or head.

Toronto is exploding with cyclists, with more and more people wanting to cycle and being turned off driving because of the incredible congestion. Biking is a much more efficient way of getting around, and you get there faster.

When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it’s worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the ’60s and ’70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music.

At 10, I heard Neil Diamond’s ‘Solitary Man’ and it moved me so deeply I stood, frozen in place during school recess, feeling such empathy for the narrator in Diamond’s masterpiece that my heart was smashed.

The stuff I write I’m very proud of, but I’m smart enough to know I’ll never get on the cover of ‘Rolling Stone’ next to Elvis Costello.

I did have one bad accident up north near Deerhurst. I was driving back in the winter on these snowy roads, and these two snowmobilers were racing up a hill and they weren’t looking, so they caught me as I was going up the other side of the hill, and they smashed into me.

When I’m not running, I cycle about 30 miles a day. I use the biking as cross training. I’m kind of a maniac. I race everybody.

I cannot emphasize just how dangerous it is cycling in the city. Especially now. Even though it is against the law to do this, you’ll see people texting while they drive.

Our house is a constant mayhem of music, noise, socializing and business. It vibrates life, as a house should.

I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don’t have a chance.

Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye’s best lyrics match Dylan’s prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.

I’m highly distractable, and I have too many things on my mind very often. When I’m driving in the city, it drives me so crazy – the city traffic and the parking – I just take cabs everywhere.

To be 23 and riding the crest of a song sweeping the world country by country is to live an altered and wholly rarefied existence.

Blessed with Mom and Dad’s remarkable genes, raised on big words and big, iconoclastic attitudes, Larry and I, before entering kindergarten, knew who we were, what we wanted, and how we would get there.

Woody Allen movies notwithstanding, therapy, in the early eighties, was not exactly a hot conversation starter. Nor was it a favoured activity for dysfunctional couples or suffering individuals.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don’t necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

When you think of bike couriers, you think of hyper speed. They get paid by how fast they can drop stuff off. The faster you go, the more chances you take. And the more chances you take, the greater the war between cyclists and cars.

I just want people to know they are the masters of their own fortune and misfortune. A lot of us think that doctors and drugs are going to control and help us, but the reality is we’re our own best doctor.

I’d sometimes do 50, 60 takes of song.

Sling your guitar to wherever you’re going, and you’ll be amazed by the connective power of music: It knows no boundaries, cultures or class.

I never go on a run when I don’t think of my dad, where I don’t think about how powerful his legs were and what happened because, unfortunately, he didn’t take care of himself.

Hit songs are mysterious and slippery beasts; few artists have a lock on them. This means that many people, like me, have become fans of songs rather than fans of artists.

I didn’t have that thing that Michael Bolton did; my star power – my charisma – was not a match to my writing ability.

In 1953, Mom and Dad, living in Toronto, discovered, to their shock, that Mom was expecting. I was born in June 1954. My parents, thrilled, showered me with love.

In Don Mills in the Sixties, nothing comes close to the humiliation of losing an argument. In our weird little creative circle, no one cares who has faster fists, but to lose an argument suggests inferior intelligence.

Songs sometimes are so connected to the sociology of the time.

Some stresses are unavoidable – it’s just part of life. One of the things I do to avoid stress is not work with people that I don’t really like or drive me crazy.

You can tell black artists are front and centre when Usher discovers and launches Justin Bieber.

I was wired to be intense. I don’t think that’s ever going to change.

I feel like I have adopted the Philippines as my second country.