Dan Bern Quotes
Every time I write a song, it's different. I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody. Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going. But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go. You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it. It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods. I could talk about the process for days. But it's never dull and there's no one way in.
Quotes to Explore
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I feel like my kind of music is a big pot of different spices. It's a soup with all kinds of ingredients in it.
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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As you get older, you see the world at a different angle, maybe more cynically, but I just bury my anger.
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All these police treating our people wrong, man. Black lives matter, but we got fans of all different colors, so all lives matter.
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A news organization has a much different responsibility. I might not be telling you the whole story. I might not be telling you a story in a manner that is properly sophisticated.
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I have a very successful father-in-law and family with very different political views.
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All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
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Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.
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I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.
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My theory is, independent movies only work if you're willing to push the material and do something different.
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I don't eat white breads, and I'm off dairy due to an allergic reaction and because of what it does to the body. I've learnt a lot about different foods and how the body breaks it down and what happens when we eliminate or incorporate certain foods, and it's pretty fascinating!
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I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.
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With a track like 'White Christmas,' everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That's kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad.
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The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.
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That could certainly be done, but I don't want to fall into the Forth trap, where every running Forth implementation is really a different language.
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I decided a handful of years ago that I just want to write songs that you can understand as soon as you put the record on. There’s no need to veil what’s happening in the song the way I used to. My goal as a songwriter now is to simply write some memorable turns of phrase.
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Generally, if you preface an interview request with, 'I'm an author writing a book,' for some reason, that seems to open a lot of doors.
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I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
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I'm not an emotional person; I keep it in, and I wouldn't know how to get it out if it weren't for acting and writing.
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You're writing about young, vibrant people; there are wins and losses. In other words, it's great drama.
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It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.
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I have enough motivation just not looking like an idiot on national television. The fear of disappointing people is certainly higher.
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Sometimes kids want a hamburger, but I'll fill it up with a quinoa tikki. We eat makhana instead of popcorn; we even take it to the movie theater! I also mash up a lot of vegetables and put it in the aata, so they don't realise they are eating vegetables.
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Every time I write a song, it's different. I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody. Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going. But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go. You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it. It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods. I could talk about the process for days. But it's never dull and there's no one way in.
