Bob Dylan Quotes

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”
― Bob Dylan

“All I can be is me- whoever that is. ”
― Bob Dylan

“You can never be wise and be in love at the same time.”
― Bob Dylan

“Everybody is waiting for cooler weather--and I am just waiting for you--. (Bob Dylan in a letter)”
― Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

“Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.”
― Bob Dylan

“It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“The finest fury is the most controlled.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.”
― Bob Dylan

“The sun's not yellow, its chicken!”
― Bob Dylan

“Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, "Running Scared," exploded into the room.
Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, "Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, "Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“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, Chronicles, Volume One

“The Duke [John Wayne] was a massive figure. He looked like a heavy piece of hauled lumber, and it didn't seem like any man could stand shoulder to shoulder with him.”
― Bob Dylan

“On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Take care of all of your memories. You cannot relive them. Bob Dylan”
― Alm Hlgh

“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, Chronicles, Volume One

“He stilled my room, for sure.”
― Suze Rotolo, Freewheelin' Time : A Memoir of Greenwich Village

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

“All I can do is be me, whatever that is. Bob Dylan”
― Alm Hlgh

“I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“One spoon of Dylan makes a gallon of meanings.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“Music is truthful… Music attracts the angels in the universe.”
― Bob Dylan, The Essential Interviews

“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

“My mind is confused, I shudder in panic. My night of pleasure has turned into terror. Setting the table to let the watchmen watch, eating and drinking, “Arise, officers, anoint the shield.” For thus said my Lord to me: Go, station the lookout, and let him tell what he sees. He will see a pair of horsemen...and he will call out like a lion. My lord, I stand on the lookout constantly during the day, and I am stationed at my post all the nights. Behold, it is coming: a chariot with a man, a pair of horsemen. Each says loudly, “It has fallen! Babylonia has fallen!”
― Seth Rogovoy, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet

“Like the Rolling Thunder Revue, The Last Waltz was fueled by cocaine. 'It was ankle deep,' says Michael McClure, who read poetry as part of the concert. 'When I look at that film, I get a coke high.' Backstage there was a cocaine room, painted white and decorated with noses cut out of Groucho Marx masks. A tape played sniffing noises. Neil Young came out to sing 'Helpless' with a white lump hanging from his nose. The producers had to hire a Hollywood optical company to have the lump removed from the film.”
― Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

“all is phony.”
― bob dylan

“You can't label him, you know, he- hes unlabelable”
― N/A Various

“Just as Bob Dylan's true audience may be those who came before him, those he's trying not to dishonor when he sings their songs or makes those songs into new ones, it may be his true biography is his inhabiting of other lives.”
― Greil Marcus

“Only Bob Dylan knows which of his songs belong in the trash and which belong in the garbage. I’m so ignorant, I’d say either one works.”
― Jarod Kintz, The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks