Greil Marcus Quotes

#1. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

Greil Marcus

#2. 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.

Greil Marcus

#3. 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.

Greil Marcus

#4. Banishing the love song, people discovered what else there was to sing about.

Greil Marcus

#5. We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

Greil Marcus

#6. 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.

Greil Marcus

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

Greil Marcus

#8. And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way,

Greil Marcus

#9. Every time Elvis sings, he makes a bargain with the devil -- just like Captain Ahab in MOBY DICK!

Greil Marcus

#10. 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 keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut.

Greil Marcus

#11. D. H. Lawrence's "Never trust the teller. Trust the tale" is always right.

Greil Marcus

#12. Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger - which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you.

Greil Marcus

#13. 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.

Greil Marcus

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

Greil Marcus

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

Greil Marcus

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

Greil Marcus

#17. 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.

Greil Marcus

#18. At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves.

Greil Marcus

#19. Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.

Greil Marcus

#20. 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.

Greil Marcus

#21. Berkeley was a lookout and a hideout.

Greil Marcus

#22. 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.

Greil Marcus

#23. Art doesn't explain itself.

Greil Marcus

#24. 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 me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.

Greil Marcus

#25. Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing ... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

Greil Marcus

#26. Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.

Greil Marcus

#27. 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.

Greil Marcus

#28. You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

Greil Marcus

#29. One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.

Greil Marcus

#30. Someone was going to want to say, I'm fucked.

Greil Marcus

#31. 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.

Greil Marcus

#32. I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like his movies, I like his excess, and I think he has a great capacity for empathy and it comes out more powerfully in this movie than in any of his other films, even the formal 'I'm identifying with the underdog' movies like 'Born on the Fourth of July.'

Greil Marcus

#33. 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.

Greil Marcus

#34. 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.

Greil Marcus

#35. 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.

Greil Marcus

#36. Blues grew out of the need to live in the brutal world that stood ready in ambush the moment one walked out of the church.

Greil Marcus

#37. Renee's self-possession, her ability to possess other selves, is a measure of the weakness of her husband, his inability to stop his own self from splitting in half.

Greil Marcus

#38. 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.

Greil Marcus