Neil Young Quotes

The music I listened to as a kid - the Stones, the Beatles - that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.

I remember Mitch Miller saying every week, This rock and roll stuff will never last. But one doesn't like to bring that up to Mitch.

Anytime something makes money, no matter how outré, it's instantly mainstream. A good example is rock 'n' roll. When rock 'n' roll was first played to a wide audience it was considered the devil's music.

There is nothing conceptually better than rock 'n' roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on Whole Lot of Shaking for my money. Or maybe I'm like our parents: that's my period and I dig it and I'll never leave it.

Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?

I think It's a bit of a disappointment that a lot of people's Golden Age of music is still the '60s.

I mean, in rock music terms I'm like a dinosaur.

My big love was the Beatles. I was more into music.

I was born at the beginning of rock and roll. I got to experience the entire evolution of popular rock and roll music even before it started.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

My pop culture ended somewhere north of Elvis but not too far.

It was the year of the Beatles, it was the year of the Stones, it was 1964.

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.

Rock 'n' roll started to make so much money and generated so much income for the record companies that suddenly it was no longer evil.

Hail, hail rock and roll / Deliver me from the days of old.

I drummed in some rock bands. I asked for a drum kit when I was 15 and my parents were kind enough to buy me one and I just started playing with my buddies who played guitar.

I wouldn't say rock & roll is dead but the current music made by young people isn't really rock & roll.

I play these [folk acoustic] concerts and I ask myself, 'Would you come see me tonight?' - and I'd have to answer truthfully, 'No, I wouldn't come. I'd rather be doin' something else, really I would. That something else is rock... The words are pictures, and the rock's gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures. (1965)

Well all of Chuck's children are out there playing his licks, get into your kicks. Come back baby, rock and roll never forgets.

If you want to do rock and roll, forget about those who've come after '65.

This is serious business, sex, violence, and rock and roll.

Maybe people would be surprised to know that I listen to old Neil Diamond albums from time to time. The man rocks. I defy anyone to prove me wrong.

I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.

Pop music has progressed. The singing voice has changed dramatically in pop music, and people now just sing the way they want to, in their speaking voice, instead of putting on some great transatlantic rock and roll sneer.

When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers.