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This category contains articles, images and quotes that were featured for a given month on the main page.

Past Revisions[]

Featured Quotes[]

  • May 2009: "I suppose on some deep and profound level, the evening would seem incomplete to me without three minutes of howling." - In reference to always seeming to have to sing "Werewolves of London" at concerts.
  • June 2009: "I always like to have violent lyrics and violent music, the knowledge of death and fear of death informs my existence. It's a safe, kind of cheerful way of dealing with that issue." - Warren Zevon - Talking about the violence in his song writing.
  • August 2009: "Well, I can't really complain. I did take copies of the albums to my doctors and said this is why I'm not so shocked." - Talking about receiving his terminal diagnosis on the The Late Show with David Letterman.
  • September 2009: "Well, that's the problem you see. I think they are eventually going to run out of parts where they need an actor to play Warren Zevon." - Talking about his television appearances on The Jon Stewart Show.
  • October 2009: "I know my image is supposed to be violent, and lots of cussing and everything, but there's a certain kind of inelegance that gives me the creeps." - Warren Zevon talking about his public persona.
  • November 2009: "In line at the market: 'Excuse me, I have terminal cancer. Can you help her with her coupons? Can we speed this up a little?'" - Warren Zevon soon after being diagnosed with Mesothelioma.
  • December 2009: "I don't remember stardom with any longing, it was a brief opportunity to be rude: 'Fire that opening act. I don't like the way he looked at me.' My success was a fluke. I was a folk singer who accidentally had one big hit." - Warren Zevon considering his brief time in the spotlight.
  • January 2010: "I always thought old age would be a good subject for rock & roll. If you thought Neil Young and I were mad about being young, wait till you hear how mad we are about being old and decrepit." - Warren Zevon on his fascination with old age and decay in his songwriting.
  • February 2010: "I just think that popular music as we understood it for a long time was kind of limited... to songs about a certain thing, love songs for the most part... And it wasn't exactly what I was doing..."- Warren Zevon on his violent and edgy song content and "song noir."
  • March 2010: ""I don’t feel I was ever badly served by the big old record industry. My records never sold and I never blamed anybody. At least they let me make them. I figured that was the whole deal." - Discussing his record sales and lack of mainstream commercial success.
  • April 2010: "And I also never really got rich but that might have been lucky too... because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich and like the issues of being famous, they're not real issues and so they're not real life... there is more of a human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop then over the phone with your accountant. If you are rich you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant, it's necessary I believe... I know I am happy and that must mean that I must be lucky, that I know." - On the soul of songwriting in comparison to wealth.
  • May 2010: "I don't think about what other people's perception of me is, at least not any more than anybody in any field does. You know, the cable guy and the person who parks your car, or your dentist thinks. Perhaps to a fault it doesn't enter into the artistic process, you know it enters into the daily interactions in real life as much as it does for anybody." - On public perception.
  • June 2010: "I think that we all can take portions of the song [I Was in the House When the House Burned Down] as first person, first hand experience. Remember what we always said 'in the songwriting field there isn't a section for fiction and a section for non-fiction, it's all mixed together.'" - On the perspectives of songwriting.
  • July 2010: "Yeah, honestly, I don't remember. I was a little medicated during the 80s... I'm not even sure if I'm on that album." - In response to Kathy Griffin's character asking "So Warren, was it really Niel Young playing on Sentimental Hygiene?" during his 1999 cameo on Suddenly Susan, parodying his drug abuse and detox in the 1980s.
  • August 2010: "I've said this before and I'll say this again, there is a song I'd like to play for ya that I wrote a decade ago or just about... In those days, when I wrote the song, I wasn't a very happy fellow. I was poor and strung out and screwed up. Now I'm just screwed up and I'm very happy, thank you, thank you very much!" - Introducing "Hasten Down the Wind" on Stand in the Fire, horribly ironic given this was just before the turmoil following The Envoy.
  • September 2010: "I called Jorge last night and his daughter, his grown daughter, was there (he wasn't), and she said 'you know a friend of mine just came from a trip to Memphis, and she said to me, you know I just went to Graceland and the most striking thing I saw in the whole place was this Porcelain Monkey of Elvis'!'" - Responding to questions about "Porcelain Monkey" from an interview included with Preludes: Rare and Unreleased Recordings.
  • October 2010: "A few months later, Warren he called me from a recording studio, where Paul Schaefer, David Letterman and that whole band were in session. And he said, 'We’re recording the hockey song.' And I said, 'What? You’re RECORDING it?' And he said, 'Why did you think I asked you to write it? To read it?'"
  • Mitch Albom
  • November 2010: "I'm insane. I'm fucked up. I have problems. But I don't get depressed and I don't get bored." - Said to David Bowman of Salon.com.
  • December 2010: "From what I know about alcoholism, I'd say there's nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave -- nothing like that about drinking. It's a real coward's death." - Quoted in Paul Nelson, "Warren Zevon's Resurrection: How he saved himself from a coward's death", Rolling Stone (1981-03-19)
  • January 2011: "The thing you have to know about Warren's work is that it was incredibly powerful in the beginning, and incredibly powerful and consistent all through his life. If you look at that two-CD set he released [the 1996 Rhino anthology, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead], that is amazing." - Jackson Browne talking to the Rolling Stone
  • February 2011: "Well, I think humor has a great deal of value. Humor is definitely good. My father was a very funny guy. A very funny guy in a very special kind of characteristic way, that is probably not unlike whatever kind of way that I'm funny, at my funniest or best. My son is a very, very funny guy." - Warren Zevon responding on the importance of humour in an interview.
  • March 2011: "I wondered why popular music was so square. Because I had been reading Norman Mailer from the time I was 12 years old. I don't think it occurred to me that I was trying to make some kind of breakthrough in the popular song. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now that, for the most part, there were some kind of restrictions on the subject matter of songs. And it was quite the opposite in every other art form." - Warren Zevon responding on his literary uniqueness in an interview.
  • April 2011: "On the other hand, when Excitable Boy was in the Top 10, the president of the record company brought me in his office and said, 'Well, so you sold 700,000 copies. There was a time when we would've celebrated that. But, I mean, the Eagles have sold 14 million, worldwide.' So it was like, 'You failed.' And people, including myself so much later in life, don't understand that about fame or fortune." - Warren Zevon on interpretations of success in an interview.
  • May 2011: "Taken collectively." - Stated by Warren Zevon, after consideration, in response to the question "You've written many songs with animal themes. Are animals more intelligent than humans?" during an interview.
  • June 2011: "Oh, no, on the contrary. Other people do. But that's their problem. There are some amusing things about it. Like the fact that there's only one drum track. Maybe there are two drum tracks. We just kept speeding it up and slowing it down, or playing it backwards. On the reissue, they deleted the most interesting track, which was some kind of weird, acid-head instrumental I played live, with all my friends in the studio." - Stated by Warren Zevon in response to the question "Is it true that you disown your first album, Wanted Dead Or Alive?" during an interview.
  • July 2011: ""No, I never paid attention. I learned things 20 years later. It was like a cold. It took me 10 years to realize that I don't know 'em, 10 years to realize that it's possible to learn them, then another 10 years to learn how to do things. And then I find, within a 30-year struggle, I know how to do harmony parts. It's true." - Stated by Warren Zevon in response to the question "Especially on your earlier albums, you had a lot of great harmony singing in the background. Did you learn about how to arrange vocal harmonies from working with the Everly Brothers?" during an interview.
  • August 2011: "I have a certain sacrilegious lack of interest in 'grooving,' per se, the whole idea of 'the white groove.' Maybe this is all a reaction to a critic who once reviewed me and said that I had 'two grooves, only two: slow march and fast march.' To which I can only respond, 'You want groove? Eddie Palmieri has groove.' Or fill in the [blank] prominent, white singer/songwriter, rock star of our age. 'What groove? This drummer hits two and four, am I a nano-second sooner or later?' I don't know. It's ignorance, I guess, masquerading as smart-aleckry. But I still mean it." - Stated by Warren Zevon on the topic of beats and "grooves" during an interview.
  • September 2011: "So, maybe that's about done. Basically there has to be new art forms. The next Picasso is gonna be a virtual reality guy." - Stated by Warren Zevon on his theory of shifting temporal artistic relevance in an interview.
  • October 2011: "But over the years, certainly, I heard new songs of Jackson's and John David's many, many times. And, I don't know, maybe it's the sweet mystery of youth itself, but I don't think it ever occurred to me, 'Jesus, I can't stand living, that song's so good!' Now, I probably would. It just always made you [feel] moved and happy.." - Stated by Warren Zevon about hearing his peers work the first time during an interview.
  • November 2011: "I will do a feature on time, I will do a feature on time, I will do a feature on time... oh, damn, I'm out" - User:Technopeasant
  • December 2011: "I think that's one your dentist told you to ask me." - Eventually stated by Warren Zevon in response to a requested question on whether or not he was really, or just artistically, cynical during an interview.
  • January 2012: "There have been many periods in my life when I couldn't even afford to have a keyboard instrument. People wonder why you aren't writing more acoustic piano songs. 'Well, because you're not buying the records, and I hocked the Yamaha the year before last! That's why!'" - Stated by Warren Zevon on the topic of pianos from an interview.
  • April 2012: "You take up the guitar in the first place because you're an inarticulate person and then you go out and talk eight hours a day about it.'" - Warren Zevon commenting on the motivations behind guitar playing.

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