If you don't have heroes in the beginning, you don't grow.
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
What's the impulse behind art? It's saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that's why I do what I do. ”
Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing. . . Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice
We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail
What always attracted me to [Bob] Dylan, and what has sustained me as a Dylan listener, or has always continued to surprise me, is his voice, the way he sings, the way he wraps his voice around certain words, the way he backs off from melodic moments, the way he moves forward to grab something in a song that, were anybody else performing it, they would have no idea it was even there.
We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.
Death cannot kill that which does not die.
Because the Western civilization is dominated by dualistic thinking, holistic scientists and philosophers don't get the recognition they deserve.
You do not lament the loss of hair of one who has been beheaded.
The state, for a long period of time, has been undergoing a wrenching economic transformation. The reality is much grimmer than in other states.