Peter Guralnick Quotations

I guess I thought of it as an American tragedy, ... It has all the elements -- the success is larger than life, the aspirations are larger than life, and the fall from grace is equally larger than life.

I thought a lot of people would dismiss the subject as trivial, ... and ... that regardless of what I achieved, the subject would be dismissed. I think I've been gratified more than anything. Whether people like the book or don't like the book, they treat the subject as worthy of discussion.

I think Elvis was dismissed because of his popularity,

I was trying to tell as honest and true a story as I could, ... Really, the challenge is to portray the world the person lives in, and in the first volume it was an expanding world. You can see in 'Careless Love' how constricted Elvis' world becomes.

The real story is that the fans are tied to Elvis by the same loyalty that he showed to them, ... He did show an extraordinary sense of identification with the fans. He had an almost mystical belief that all of his strength -- and his very legitimacy -- came from his fans.

Even as a child he had a vision of success taking place in a world that he couldn't possibly imagine, except through the movies, ... That's what lends the story either a tragic resonance or pathos or whatever.

This is something I wanted to do for over 20 years, ... From the time I first met J.W. Alexander, he drew an inspiring portrait of an individual you wouldn't know from the music alone.

That really bothered him -- where it came from -- and also, he was afraid he had gone beyond his audience.

It's like he gained a lot from his popularity, but he suffers a lot for it too,

Everyone looked at him like he was their ... savior, ... everywhere he went he was an object of admiration and adoration -- and yet he couldn't muffle the growing discontent, the helplessness he felt at his inability to control not so much the world around him as his private world, the inner world that was revealed to no one but him.

I wanted to write the book as far inside as possible,

They looked up to him. Even Barbara -- she's still trying to understand Sam. And J.W. -- Sam was the person he'd liked to have been.

His father had taught him to never be taken advantage of or be disrespected, ... Songwriting and publishing were far more important for income than making records. It took Sam two minutes to recognize that the publishing deal he'd signed in 1957 was very disadvantageous to him.

I didn't know Gate well, but I always appreciated him, most of all, his feisty, independent spirit and warm heart, ... Gate was the original contrarian, but there was always a well thought-out argument behind it. It wasn't just that Gate was unwilling to play the fool. He simply refused to live up to anyone else's definition or expectations of him. But I think this was part of his genius. From the start, Gate defined himself, both as a musician and as a man.

He believed he could do everything until the day he died.