Jon Landau Quotes

Bob Dylan is as influential as any artist that there has been.

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.

Dylan captured what was on a million minds and turned it into poetry. With 'Blowin' in the Wind' or 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' he set a whole new standard.

Creativity is a yearning for immortality

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

We'd like to think that our music will always be bigger than any one of our individual personalities.

Marley is someone before his time, man. He's - he's almost - he's like a deity, like almost, you know what I mean? I just talk about what's going on, but of course, you know, Bob, before rappers, was already laying that kind of thing down.

Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock n' roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early work and subjected to exhaustive attack when later works were thought to be inferior. Both developed their art without so much as a nodding glance toward their peers.

I think a lot of people want to be remembered the way they were, as opposed to the way they are now.

Persons famous in the arts partake of the immortality of princes, and are upon a footing with them.

Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.

I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all.

My week is full-tilt boogie. I wake up every morning, and the singular thought in my head is that maybe today is the day that I'm going to find an artist who is so amazing, an artist who will change pop culture. I'm in hot pursuit, always.

Tupac is huge; he's an inspiration. Arguably, he's probably the biggest, most analyzed and loved artist of all time.

If you suddenly go striving for different things from what have stood you in good stead over a period of time then you're searching for something that you are probably not going to find.

It's important to evolve without ever straying too far from your roots and what established you.

Kendrick Lamar is a great, great thinker. He's a tremendous artist.

When I got 'forever' tattooed on my throat, it meant that my legacy was going to live forever. So anything that I create, I do it because I believe it will live on, forever.

Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms

Poet, forger of ideals, dreamer among the possibilities of life, prophet of the millenium, do you get impatient with the prosaic life around you -- the dulness, and the earthliness, and the brutishness of men? Fret not. Go forward into the realm which stretches before you; climb the highest mountain you can reach, and plant a cross there. The nations will come up to it some day. Work for immortality if you will; then wait for it. If your own age fail to recognize you, a coming age will not.

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay.

Artists are often the barometers of society.