41 Quotes by Dave Van Ronk

I think I have more in common with a carpenter than you might think. We're putting things together.

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

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

I don't think I went a year or so without a record between 1959 and 1979, sometimes two.

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

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.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

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.