Chronicles, Volume One Quotes
"You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you’ll have to put on a few pounds. You’re gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper—not that you’ll need much in the way of clothes when you’re in the ring—don’t be afraid of hitting somebody too hard."
"He’s not a boxer, Jack, he’s a songwriter and we’ll be publishing his songs."
"The room was cluttered—boxes of sheet music stacked up, recording dates of artists posted on bulletin boards, black lacquered discs, acetates with white labels scrambled around, signed photos of entertainers, glossy portraits."
"My mind was strong like a trap and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity."
"It wasn’t money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot."
"I felt like I was coming out of the back pasture."
"I couldn’t have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world."
"I needed to learn how to play and sing by myself and not depend on a band until the time I could afford to pay and keep one."
"Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain."
"Folk songs are evasive—the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be."
"In order to be as good as that, you’d just about have to be him, and nobody else."
"The future was nothing to worry about. It was awfully close."
"My destiny lay down the road with whatever life invited, had nothing to do with representing any kind of civilization."
"I was a family man now, didn’t want to be in that group portrait."
"If you ever get a couple of hundred bucks, buy me something."
"Folk songs played in my head, they always did. Folk songs were the underground story."
"I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad."
"Art is unimportant next to life, and you have no choice."
"Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work."
"Liberty for myself and my loved ones had to be secured. I had no time to kill and I didn’t like what was being thrown at me."
"Coming back I quickly recorded what appeared to be a country-western record and made sure it sounded pretty bridled and housebroken."
"I wasn’t going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. I was already living in the darkness."
"The novelist Herman Melville’s work went largely unnoticed after Moby-Dick."
"I started a rumor with my record company that I would be quitting music and going to college."
"For the public eye, I went into the bucolic and mundane as far as possible."
"The actor Tony Curtis once told me that fame is an occupation in itself, that it is a separate thing."
"Scratch utters the lines 'I know there is evil in the world—essential evil, not the opposite of good or the defective of good but something to which good itself is an irrelevance—a fantasy.'"
"I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic."
"What I heard was Woody singing a whole lot of his own compositions all by himself."
"For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor."
"It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor."
"Woody Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces."
"Woody’s got a fierce poetic soul—the poet of hard crust sod and gumbo mud."
"Woody made each word count. He painted with words."
"Woody’s songs were having that big an effect on me."
"You can’t take only a few dance lessons and then think you are Fred Astaire."
"Johnson’s voice and guitar were ringing the room and I was mixed up in it."
"Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver like piano wires."
"The songs were layered with a startling economy of lines."
"It felt like I’d crossed the threshold and there was nothing in sight."