Top 20 Quotes by Dave Van Ronk

By the mid-70s, I wanted to get out of the business. I was tired anyway.

Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.

When you're working in front of an audience, you have incentive to excel.

If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

I'm an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.