Bob Dylan on Rimbaud, from “Chronicles: Volume One” (published 20 years):
I came across one of his letters called “Je est un autre,” which translates into “I is someone else.” When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier.
That is, without love and theft, new things can’t happen:
“If I hadn’t … heard the ballad ‘Pirate Jenny,’ it might not have dawned on me … that songs like these could be written. In about 1964 and ’65, I probably used about five or six of Robert Johnson’s blues song forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down — that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or upraised enough to write.”
The Rolling Stones—like Bob Dylan, also named from love, in their case, Muddy Waters—same thing:
They wanted the Chess sound … to be exactly like the originals. But it came out like the Rolling Stones. Marshall Chess
Zadie Smith says the same thing:
I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read. Fascinated To Presume
Lewis Hyde summarises:
Dylan seems to me to be saying, “If I am anything, it is because I have allowed others to inhabit me.”