Greil Marcus Quotes

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

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

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.

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.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft–and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.

I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.

Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.

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

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

Think about how rare it is for anyone to encounter a teacher who can open you up to the notion that there is an infinite amount of meaning and possibility and inspiration in the smallest thing before you.

If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.

I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.

I never could understand - it was impossible for me to get my head around - what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan's beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio.

I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.