Richie Havens (Richard Pierce "Richie" Havens) Quotes
I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
Quotes to Explore
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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I actually bought a travel guitar, and that guitar is really cool. You can actually fold the guitar, and you can plug headphones into it, but it's acoustic, or semi-acoustic.
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I have been desperate to escape for so many years now, it is routine for me to try to escape.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
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To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.
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Poetry is the deification of reality.
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When I finally put my guitar in the case the last time, I want to be remembered just as a singer, not as a country singer or pops singer - just a singer.
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Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
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I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.
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Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.
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I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
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I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.
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One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
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As I try to get around with a guitar, a banjo and a suitcase of high heels and dresses, I treasure that little ukulele.
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I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
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There will be some tracks on the next album which that will consist of mostly noise and feedback, whereas others may just have guitar parts and samples.
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None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
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Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
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I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.
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I haven't had to do anything outside of show business my whole life. I've never been a waiter. I've only worked and gotten paid. It hasn't been a classic example of someone slogging through the business.
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When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal.
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To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
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I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
