Bob Dylan

Ron Rosenbaum: Why are you doing what you're doing?Bob Dylan: I'm an artist. I try to create art.

— Bob Dylan

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.

— Bob Dylan

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

— Bob Dylan

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?

— Bob Dylan

I kinda live where I find myself.

— Bob Dylan

I think women rule the world, and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.

— Bob Dylan

I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.

— Bob Dylan

At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don't know. Lately if I read poems, it's like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare's sonnets I can hear a melody because it's all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, 'What kind of song would this be?'

— Bob Dylan

Chaos is a friend of mine.

— Bob Dylan

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

— Bob Dylan

If the songs are dreamed, it's like my voice is coming out of their dream.

— Bob Dylan

Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the cost comes down, look out!

— Bob Dylan

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. Anybody who could possibly call himself a poet just cannot be a poet.

— Bob Dylan

When I first heard Elvis's voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock and roll religion as it exists in today's form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. I think for a long time that freedom to me was Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.' I thank God for Elvis.

— Bob Dylan

The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out, and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.

— Bob Dylan

It's not to anybody's best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.

— Bob Dylan

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

— Bob Dylan

My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is... Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.

— Bob Dylan

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.

— Bob Dylan

That ear - I mean, Jesus, he's got to will that to the Smithsonian.

— Bob Dylan

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.

— Bob Dylan

There is nothing so stable as change.

— Bob Dylan

I'm inconsistent, even to myself.

— Bob Dylan

We may not be able to defeat these swine, but we don't have to join them.

— Bob Dylan

I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere… set out to find… this home that I’d left a while back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so, I’m on my way home, you know?

— Bob Dylan

An artist has gotta be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming.

— Bob Dylan

You don't need my autograph. If you needed it, I'd give it to you.

— Bob Dylan

You can't be wise and in love at the same time.

— Bob Dylan

I had no answers to any of those questions any more than any other performer did, really. But, you know, that didn't stop the press or people or whoever they were from asking these questions. They, for some reason the press thought that performers had the answers to all these problems in the society and you know, like what can... What can you say to something like that? I mean, it's just kind of absurd.

— Bob Dylan

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

— Bob Dylan

Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.

— Bob Dylan

I think it's the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice. I think I have a dualistic nature. I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

— Bob Dylan

It’s not a character like in a book or a movie. He’s not a bus driver. He doesn’t drive a forklift. He’s not a serial killer. It’s me who’s singing that, plain and simple. We shouldn’t confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, “My character this, and my character that.” Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don’t have to explain it to me.

— Bob Dylan

It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.

— Bob Dylan

The people in my songs are all me.

— Bob Dylan

It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity.

— Bob Dylan

I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don't think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.

— Bob Dylan

Morality has nothing in common with politics.

— Bob Dylan

What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening—all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.

— Bob Dylan

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn't yet.

— Bob Dylan

America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes... My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch.

— Bob Dylan

I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.

— Bob Dylan

I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.

— Bob Dylan

I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.

— Bob Dylan

I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned — didn't know if I was stoned or straight... All these songs together, one after another made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted.

— Bob Dylan

The road out would be treacherous, and I didn’t know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges. Many got it wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either.

— Bob Dylan

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon.

— Bob Dylan

As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried.

— Bob Dylan

...we are singing today of the WIPE-OUT GANG - the WIPE-OUT GANG buys, owns & operates the Insanity Factory - if you do not know where the Insanity Factory is located, you should hereby take two steps to the right, paint your teeth & go to sleep....

— Bob Dylan

look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/...

— Bob Dylan

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you'd like to act.

— Bob Dylan

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

— Bob Dylan

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

— Bob Dylan

He not busy being born is busy dying.

— Bob Dylan

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.

— Bob Dylan

What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

— Bob Dylan

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

— Bob Dylan

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

— Bob Dylan

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

— Bob Dylan

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

— Bob Dylan

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

— Bob Dylan

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

— Bob Dylan

I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed... so drastically, I couldn't believe it myself.

— Bob Dylan

Chaos is a friend of mine.

— Bob Dylan

All I can be is me- whoever that is.

— Bob Dylan

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

— Bob Dylan

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

— Bob Dylan

The purpose of art is to stop time.

— Bob Dylan

I kinda live where I find myself.

— Bob Dylan

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

— Bob Dylan

It [folk music] exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified.

— Bob Dylan

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

— Bob Dylan

You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

— Bob Dylan

A lot of people can't stand touring but to me it's like breathing. I do it because I'm driven to do it.

— Bob Dylan

Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.

— Bob Dylan

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

— Bob Dylan

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

— Bob Dylan

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

— Bob Dylan

What good are fans? You can't eat applause for breakfast. You can't sleep with it.

— Bob Dylan

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

— Bob Dylan

I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.

— Bob Dylan

I'm not the kind of cat that's going to cut off an ear if I can't do something.

— Bob Dylan

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

— Bob Dylan

If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

— Bob Dylan

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere.

— Bob Dylan

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

— Bob Dylan

I'm just glad to be feeling better. I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon.

— Bob Dylan

I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy.

— Bob Dylan

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

— Bob Dylan

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

— Bob Dylan

Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.

— Bob Dylan

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.

— Bob Dylan

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

— Bob Dylan

There is nothing so stable as change.

— Bob Dylan

I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.

— Bob Dylan

In ceremonies of the horsemen, even the pawn must hold a grudge.

— Bob Dylan

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

— Bob Dylan

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

— Bob Dylan

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.

— Bob Dylan

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

— Bob Dylan

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

— Bob Dylan

Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid.

— Bob Dylan

You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

— Bob Dylan

It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be...

— Bob Dylan

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

— Bob Dylan

I have dined with kings, I've been offered wings. And I've never been too impressed.

— Bob Dylan

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

— Bob Dylan

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

— Bob Dylan

It's hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

— Bob Dylan

You can't do something forever.

— Bob Dylan

I'm speaking for all of us. I'm the spokesman for a generation.

— Bob Dylan

The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots.

— Bob Dylan

I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that.

— Bob Dylan

Money doesn't talk, it swears.

— Bob Dylan

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

— Bob Dylan

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

— Bob Dylan

What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.

— Bob Dylan

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

— Bob Dylan

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

— Bob Dylan

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

— Bob Dylan

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king.

— Bob Dylan

You call yourself what you want to call yourself.

— Bob Dylan

I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds.

— Bob Dylan

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

— Bob Dylan

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

— Bob Dylan

I can't see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That's terrible.

— Bob Dylan

I can't act!

— Bob Dylan

It's not easy to define poetry.

— Bob Dylan

You can't be happy by doing something groovy.

— Bob Dylan

I never saw myself as a folk singer.

— Bob Dylan

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.

— Bob Dylan

I'm inconsistent, even to myself.

— Bob Dylan

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.

— Bob Dylan

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

— Bob Dylan

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young.

— Bob Dylan

A lot of people don't like the road, but it's as natural to me as breathing.

— Bob Dylan

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

— Bob Dylan

You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

— Bob Dylan

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

— Bob Dylan

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

— Bob Dylan

I'm sick of giving creeps money off my soul.

— Bob Dylan

I realize I don't do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

— Bob Dylan

Nothing can affect my voice, it's so bad.

— Bob Dylan

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

— Bob Dylan

I don't think I'm tangible to myself.

— Bob Dylan

Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.

— Bob Dylan

My range is limited.

— Bob Dylan

I'm more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

— Bob Dylan

The people in my songs are all me.

— Bob Dylan

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

— Bob Dylan

I think I have a dualistic nature.

— Bob Dylan

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

— Bob Dylan

Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.

— Bob Dylan

I'm not a playwright.

— Bob Dylan

I'm mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it's the only place where I'm happy.

— Bob Dylan

The radio makes hideous sounds.

— Bob Dylan

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

— Bob Dylan

I can't stand to see myself on television.

— Bob Dylan

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

— Bob Dylan

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

— Bob Dylan

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

— Bob Dylan

What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

— Bob Dylan

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

— Bob Dylan

He not busy being born is busy dying.

— Bob Dylan

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

— Bob Dylan

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

— Bob Dylan

Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want (Bob Dylan's dad)

— Bob Dylan

He not busy being born is busy dying.

— Bob Dylan

Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.

— Bob Dylan

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.

— Bob Dylan

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

— Bob Dylan

Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

— Bob Dylan

Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.

— Bob Dylan

There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.

— Bob Dylan

I am a writer an a singer of the words I write I am no speaker nor any politician an my songs speak for me because I write them in the confinement of my own mind an have t cope with no one except my own self.

— Bob Dylan

do Not create anything, it will beit will follow you the rest of your life.

— Bob Dylan

a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet

— Bob Dylan

He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.

— Bob Dylan

I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word.

— Bob Dylan

I find it easy to write songs. I been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren't written out just for the paper; they're written as you can read it, you dig. If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can't do that with either—songs that, if you took the beat and the melody away, they wouldn't stand up because they're not supposed to do that, you know. Songs are songs.

— Bob Dylan

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know there are some people terrified of the bomb, but there are others terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine. Experience teaches that silence terrifies the most.

— Bob Dylan

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there's some kind of change.

— Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan: I do know what my songs are about.Bob Dylan: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.

— Bob Dylan

Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

— Bob Dylan

I don't believe you! You're a liar! … Play it fucking loud!

— Bob Dylan

Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.

— Bob Dylan

You have to be let alone to really accomplish anything.

— Bob Dylan

I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don't believe that any more. There's myself and there's my song, which I hope is everybody's song.

— Bob Dylan

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

— Bob Dylan

Greed and lust I can understand, but I can't understand the values of definition and confinement. Definition destroys. Besides, there's nothing definite in this world.

— Bob Dylan

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

— Bob Dylan