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.
— Donovan
When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He'd studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.
I never considered myself an entertainer. I always felt I had to be connected to something meaningful, or it wasn't worth doing.
I wasn't trying to sound like anybody else. Basically, I was just experimenting all over the place.
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.
If you have a loved one, you can survive anything.
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.
I'm probably the most successful Celtic bard of my generation, who projected this style and this image and this casketful of magical songs all around the world.
Myself and The Beatles thought surely there was a way through our fame and success to bring something to our generation to help chill the future out.
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.
I get plastic nails done in the salon. When I was younger, they were stronger, but now I get my nails built up. Then I can dance over the strings. I say, 'Okay, I need four nails; I'm a guitarist.' Sometimes if I'm in a strange place, the girl says, 'Yeah, all the guys say that.'
I went to America not for fame or fortune but to be able to communicate with the biggest audience.
I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down.
I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.
I regard myself as an international man, a citizen of the earth.
I found in Rick Rubin a kindred soul. When I visited his home and looked in his library, I saw he was reading the very same New Age books I had picked up the month before.
Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.
In my time, we didn't know songs could last. All we ever thought of was next Tuesday. You never imagined a future.
Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.
There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.
I meditate every day and do some hatha yoga every day.
The planet is alive, and it's a woman.
I learned that if you wait long enough, you just grow older.
I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.
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.
Meditation is certainly not a religion, cult, or spiritual path: it's actually a very basic practice to reduce stress.
Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.
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.'
Actually, I'm the Scottish Woody Guthrie.
Blues and jazz are such a root to music.
I became a recluse many times and enjoyed a private life I didn't have during the '60s.
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.
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 was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.
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.
The Beatles and I became fast friends.
Poets have a sense of place. My place was London, and I sang about it.
Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.
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.
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.
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.
It's not like me and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr hang out every week, but we keep together in promoting Transcendental Meditation.
With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.
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.
The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.
Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension.
I'm a teacher, but I'm really a healer.
Rock and jazz came together in a very powerful way on 'Barabajagal.'
A young person coming up and saying, 'I absolutely love your music,' is very encouraging.
I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.
