A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!

In 1968, I bought a 114-foot yacht, built in 1946, and lived on the Greek islands for a while. We had an extraordinary time in it. Then I gave it to The Beatles.

Celebrities can suffer a horrible loneliness even though they have millions of fans. I started doing meditations because I realized that a spiritual path was necessary.

After having polio, my right leg was weaker, so I wasn't great at football. But I swam lots and even did long-distance running.

I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.

'Sunshine Superman' was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.

I already had top 10 records before 'Sunshine Superman,' with 'Catch the Wind' and 'Colors,' but this was a real breakthrough for me. It was a consciousness change for songwriting, as people are now saying I initiated the psychedelic revolution with this album, 'Sunshine Superman.'

It's really much more than the plastic of album covers and record sales and dollars and cents. Music is just everybody's mother. Music is the power of you.

The poet is the voice of the people. And when the poet presents certain ideas, two phrases in one poem can alter a generation's view. So poets have always been feared - and controlled and jailed.

Having had polio never held me back as I got older. Although having one leg smaller than the other isn't much fun, I could always get about without any trouble. Luckily, in the music industry, everyone was only interested in my singing and playing and not the size of my legs.

I'm a teacher, but I'm really a healer.

Coming from art school, I had a great sense of style - as did The Beatles and the Stones - and I enjoyed projecting that. Image, attitude, great music and great lyrics - that was the '60s.

When the mid-'70s came around, it looked like, 'Oh-oh, here come the punks.' But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there... There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.

It's not like me and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr hang out every week, but we keep together in promoting Transcendental Meditation.

A man always has to leave his homeland, go to another time zone, another culture, to get a different recognition - to be accepted as someone who's following a different path, who's moving into a different mode.

When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He'd studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.

In England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism.

I've been vegetarian for many years and only eat fish if I have to.

When I was a boy, I had a grand, big tape recorder, and I made late-night radio shows with glasses of water and funny voices. I just loved radio plays.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

I first met Linda Lawrence in March 1965 in the green room of 'Ready Steady Go!,' the British pop TV show. Linda was a friend of one of the co-hosts. She had an art-school vibe, and after a brief conversation, I asked her to dance to a soul record playing. As we jazz danced, I fell in love.

The 'Bohemian Manifesto' represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.

My dad would always ask, 'How's the money?' but I was never interested. Millions came and went, stolen by the robbers in the music industry. But as someone said, 'You'll never be poor as long as you can pick up a guitar.'

I found in Rick Rubin a kindred soul. When I visited his home and looked in his library, I saw he was reading the very same New Age books I had picked up the month before.

I am so highly skilled that when I pick up a phrase and then pick up my guitar, a form comes out almost immediately - a song - and once I start, I have to finish it.

I was a virtuoso of all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached 17.

Rock and jazz came together in a very powerful way on 'Barabajagal.'

The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.

Before, it had been fame, and then super-fame came. And then it became super-super-fame. One loses one's personal life, really; you're recognized everywhere. But I embraced that.

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.

I have to say, post-fame was difficult because it wasn't just fame: it was super-fame of a kind that few have. It was attached to a generation's dreams, and my own personal dreams were mixed up in it, too.

My music translates again and again to younger generations of players because I broke all the rules, and they can break all the rules now, too.

Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.

I learned that if you wait long enough, you just grow older.

I have always just experimented, and I come from a very ancient, acoustic root. It was very hard to put a finger on me.

Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.

In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.

In my time, we didn't know songs could last. All we ever thought of was next Tuesday. You never imagined a future.

I've experimented with so many different sounds, it's difficult to say what the Donovan sound really is, but it's essentially my voice and guitars.

Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.

I can't help it: when something strikes me, I write it down.

Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension.

I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.

Part of being a pop star is image. I'm told by many of my female fans that I was the poster on their bedroom walls. But if I only had that - the image and the beauty and the curly locks - I would have been a 'normal' pop star, one who comes and goes after one hit record.

I wasn't perfect, although during the '60s, I may have appeared to be. After all, I was partying away there for awhile. From age 17 to 25, I worked only on the outer man, and I did pretty well, but I needed to go back and work on the inside.

Myself and The Beatles thought surely there was a way through our fame and success to bring something to our generation to help chill the future out.

My guitar-playing always included bass lines, melody lines, and rhythm-guitar grooves.

Honors and awards are very interesting, and I truly accept them. I have very high regard for what they mean. What they mean is that they're pointing to the work.

Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't sit down to write like you'd sit down to make a pair of boots.