Bob Dylan Quotes

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. Who are the best musicians for these songs? Am I recording in the right studio? Is this song in the right key? Some things never change, even in 400 years.Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, Are my songs literature?So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

~ Bob Dylan

If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

~ Bob Dylan

Yet there’s no one to beat you | No one t’ defeat you | ’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad

~ Bob Dylan

I’m happy to just be able to come across things. I don’t need to be happy. Happiness is a kind of cheap word. Let’s face it, I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something. I would commit suicide. I would shoot myself in the brain if things got bad. I would jump from a window…you know, I can think about death openly. It’s nothing to fear. It’s nothing sacred. I’ve seen so many people die. Life’s not sacred either

~ Bob Dylan

I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial.Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it the invisible republic.Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.

~ 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

And if you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you.

~ Bob Dylan

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.

~ Bob Dylan

Be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want. -Bob Dylan's Dad

~ Bob Dylan

Come writers and criticsWho prophesize with your penAnd keep your eyes wideThe chance won't come againAnd don't speak too soonFor the wheel's still in spinAnd there's no tellin' whoThat it's namin'For the loser nowWill be later to winFor the times they are a-changin'.

~ Bob Dylan

My grandfather was a duck trapperHe could do it with just dragnets and ropesMy grandmother could sew new dresses out of old clothI don't know if they had any dreams or hopesI had 'em once though, I suppose, to go alongWith all the ring-dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas evesI left all my dreams and hopesBuried under tobacco leaves

~ Bob Dylan

Don't criticize what you can't understand.

~ Bob Dylan

People are crazy and times are strange,I'm locked in tightI'm out of range,I use to carebut things have changed.

~ Bob Dylan

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

~ Bob Dylan

..my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same.

~ Bob Dylan

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

~ Bob Dylan

Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

~ Bob Dylan

No martyr is among ye now | Whom you can call your own | So go on your way accordingly | But know you’re not alone.

~ Bob Dylan

Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting If I could hear his heart softly pounding Yes, and only if he was lying by me Would I lie in my bed once again.

~ Bob Dylan

I never took much, I never asked for your crutch, Now don't ask for mine.

~ Bob Dylan

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular.

~ Bob Dylan

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

~ Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man?

~ Bob Dylan

Yes 'n' how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free? Yes. 'n' how many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn't see? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind.

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

~ 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

It's not easy to define poetry.

~ Bob Dylan

There is nothing so stable as change.

~ Bob Dylan