The Nobel Lecture Quotes

“Then you notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this. Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the sun—you see how nature is indifferent to it all.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“He changes identities. He’s exhausted. He falls asleep, and he’s woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells his story to strangers. He’s been gone twenty years. He was carried off somewhere and left there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“Then you notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this. Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the sun—you see how nature is indifferent to it all. All the violence and suffering of mankind. Nature doesn’t even notice it.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“All that culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom—Plato, Aristotle, Socrates—what happened to it? It should have prevented this.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“Another ship’s captain—Captain Boomer—he lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance. This book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest—typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head—the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries—and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture

“Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.”
― Bob Dylan, The Nobel Lecture