Greil Marcus Quotes

29 quotes in 625 categories

• Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.
• 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…
• 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…
• I was the first records editor at Rolling Stone, and there were no rules. There was nothing to fall back on as to how do…
• 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…
• We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.
• I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.
• 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…
• You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.
• Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term 'still' seems meaningless to…
• 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,…
• 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…
• I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just…
• 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…
• If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He…
• The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as…

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