Top 60 Donovan Quotes

A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!

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.’

My guitar-playing always included bass lines, melody lines, and rhythm-guitar grooves.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

I became a recluse many times and enjoyed a private life I didn’t have during the ’60s.

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

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.

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

My father brought me up to be a socialist.

Having had polio never held me back as I got older. Although having one leg smaller than the other isn’t much fun, I could always get about without any trouble. Luckily, in the music industry, everyone was only interested in my singing and playing and not the size of my legs.

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.

The songs I write and sing try to say important things with a lightness.

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

The ‘Bohemian Manifesto’ represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.

The planet is alive, and it’s a woman.

What I needed and actually need is a discipline of tradition, which is lacking in our civilization. Discipline of tradition and the ceremony of humbleness.

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.

Celebrities can suffer a horrible loneliness even though they have millions of fans. I started doing meditations because I realized that a spiritual path was necessary.

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

I’m a teacher, but I’m really a healer.

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

The similarity between my music and The Beatles’ music is it has within it a very positive quality. It’s woven with humor.

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

My music translates again and again to younger generations of players because I broke all the rules, and they can break all the rules now, too.

A man always has to leave his homeland, go to another time zone, another culture, to get a different recognition – to be accepted as someone who’s following a different path, who’s moving into a different mode.

It’s really much more than the plastic of album covers and record sales and dollars and cents. Music is just everybody’s mother. Music is the power of you.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

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

I regard myself as an international man, a citizen of the earth.

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.

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.

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.

‘Superman’ had nothing to do with the superhero or physical power. It’s a reference to the book ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra,’ by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the evolution of consciousness to reach a higher superman state.

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

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

I meditate every day and do some hatha yoga every day.

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.

The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.

In the 1960s, I was convinced that the world was extremely mentally ill.

I’ve exhibited quite a few of my photographs. I expand them digitally till they’re very big. It’s an art school thing, I suppose.

Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.

Honors and awards are very interesting, and I truly accept them. I have very high regard for what they mean. What they mean is that they’re pointing to the work.

I’ve experimented with so many different sounds, it’s difficult to say what the Donovan sound really is, but it’s essentially my voice and guitars.

I already had top 10 records before ‘Sunshine Superman,’ with ‘Catch the Wind’ and ‘Colors,’ but this was a real breakthrough for me. It was a consciousness change for songwriting, as people are now saying I initiated the psychedelic revolution with this album, ‘Sunshine Superman.’

A young person coming up and saying, ‘I absolutely love your music,’ is very encouraging.

The Beatles and I became fast friends.

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

‘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.

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.

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

The way I sing my songs leads the listener into a place of introspection, a state of mind that can trigger self-healing and the kind of profound rest you cannot get from sleep alone.

In 1968, I bought a 114-foot yacht, built in 1946, and lived on the Greek islands for a while. We had an extraordinary time in it. Then I gave it to The Beatles.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately – a song – and once I start, I have to finish it.

I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.

I didn’t realise that I was so accomplished on the guitar until someone said to me, ‘How do you do that?’ That someone was John Lennon. He asked me to teach him my technique.

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.

I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.

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

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.

Rock and jazz came together in a very powerful way on ‘Barabajagal.’