“From the strength of their personal decency and dedication, the musicians summoned up an oceanic passion, a commitment to the true experience of their materials that short-circuited the hair on the back of one’s neck”

"Folk music is being challenged by a creative cadre of insurgents, all city intellectuals and almost all in their early or mid 20s, who write and sing topical songs characterized by radicalism, wit, immediacy, and poetry."

“A great artist, a great rocker, a great purveyor of schlock, a great heartthrob, a great bore, a great symbol of potency, a great ham, a great nice person, and, yes, a great American”

"We went in thinking, we'll document the Band's last concert and maybe we'll get something, maybe we won't. Then when the footage came back I just said, 'Wow. This is fantastic. We've got a movie.’ ” 

Voice writers Karen Durbin, Richard Goldstein, Mark Jacobson, James Wolcott, Tom Allen, Terry Curtis Fox, and J. Hoberman weigh in on the 1978 film

“We don’t have to bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967, too”

“Hey look, I consider Hank Williams, Captain Marvel, Marlon Brando, The Tennessee Stud, Clark Kent, Walter Cronkite, and J. Carrol Nalsh all influences. Now what is it — please — what is it exactly you people want to know?”

25-year-old Dylan has already won this generation of rebels, just as Kerouac and Camus have won earlier generations: his words, values, imagery, even his eccentric life-style, are grooved into more under-30 brains than any other writer's.

“Dylan was afraid, that was for sure. But he wasn’t afraid of us, the audience. It was himself he feared — the process or going back over those songs which bore the pain of becoming Bob Dylan, the highs, the lows, all of that life.”

“When the celestial mood grips Prine the sky is thick with black angels, Jesus covers the waterfront, and God’s not in his heav­en — he’s on the phone and won’t let well enough alone.”