Bob Dylan Quotes

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.
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
How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man?
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
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
I never took much, I never asked for your crutch, Now don't ask for mine.
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
Beauty walks a razors edge, someday I'll make it mine.
Bob Dylan
Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift - look out out kid, they keep it all hid
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
Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.
Bob Dylan
Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
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
Once upon a time You dressed so fine
Bob Dylan
A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.
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
Don't criticize what you can't understand.
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
People talk about egos as if it were objects.
Bob Dylan
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
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
Be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want." -Bob Dylan's Dad
Bob Dylan
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.
Bob Dylan
People are crazy and times are strangeI'm locked in tight, I'm out of rangeI used to care, but things have changed
Bob Dylan
And if you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you.
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
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
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
Yet there’s no one to beat you | No one t’ defeat you | ’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad
Bob Dylan
If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.
Bob Dylan
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
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
Inside the museums, | Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
Bob Dylan
DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.
Bob Dylan
The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries -you can be an intellectual genius. If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost like a war against the self.
Bob Dylan
It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that moved -a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.
Bob Dylan
It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry
Bob Dylan
I wasn't going to go deeper into the darkness for anybody. I was already living in the darkness. My family was my light and I was going to protect that light at all cost. That was where my dedication was, first, last and everything in-between. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing.
Bob Dylan
Your heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark.
Bob Dylan
She's got everything she needs; she's an artist, she don't look back.
Bob Dylan
reality has too many heads
Bob Dylan
When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.
Bob Dylan
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
There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief...
Bob Dylan
Thinking of a series of dreamsWhere the time and the tempo flyAnd there's no exit in any direction'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes
Bob Dylan
When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to loose.
Bob Dylan
I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan
And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.
Bob Dylan
Play it fuckin' loud!
Bob Dylan
Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.
Bob Dylan
Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the callDon't stand in the doorwayDon't block up the hallFor he that gets hurtWill be he who has stalledThere's a battle outside ragin'.It'll soon shake your windowsAnd rattle your wallsFor the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan
The line it is drawnThe curse it is castThe slow one nowWill later be fastAs the present nowWill later be pastThe new order isRapidly fadin'.And the first one nowWill later be lastFor the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan
If you're looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came. because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same.
Bob Dylan
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
Bob Dylan
I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.
Bob Dylan
I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours
Bob Dylan
Let me ask you one questionIs your money that goodWill it buy you forgivenessDo you think that it couldI think you will findWhen your death takes its tollAll the money you madeWill never buy back your soul
Bob Dylan
I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see Creation just about everywhere. The highest form of song is prayer. King David's, Solomon's, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the Earth.
Bob Dylan
Ah, but I was so much older thenI’m younger than that now
Bob Dylan
Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you'd like to act.
Bob Dylan