93 Quotes by Greil Marcus

What's the impulse behind art? It's saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that's why I do what I do.”

Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

You’re going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

Art doesn’t explain itself.

I never could understand – it was impossible for me to get my head around – what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan’s beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio.

I want another idea, another project, but you can’t make them up. They show up.

For every new art form there’s someone to come along and pronounce it dead, but rarely has an art form been born dead – as is the case with rock video, and its major outlet, MTV.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.