Donovan

“Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.”

“You endure what is supposedly unbearable, and before you know it, you would have done the impossible by bearing the unbearable.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The poet is the voice of the people. And when the poet presents certain ideas, two phrases in one poem can alter a generation's view. So poets have always been feared - and controlled and jailed.”

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

“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.”

“Actually, I'm the Scottish Woody Guthrie.”

“The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.”

“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.”

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

“Blues and jazz are such a root to music.”

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

“I've been vegetarian for many years and only eat fish if I have to.”

“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 England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism.”

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

“Society may shun bohemia, may put it down, may consider it useless and ineffective, but it is where everything cooks and boils and is created.”