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

“I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so I'm on my way home.”
― Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan - No Direction Home: A Martin Scorsese Picture

“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

“Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, all dark, all romantic. When I say “romantic,” I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn’t know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song.”
― Jeff Buckley

“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

“People are crazy and times are strange ... I used to care but things have changed ”
― 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, 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

“..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, Chronicles, Volume One

“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 really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.”
― 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

“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

“My big fear was that my guitar would go out of tune.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“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, Chronicles, Volume One

“She's got everything she needs; she's an artist, she don't look back.”
― Bob Dylan, Lyrics, 1962-1985

“All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. 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, Chronicles, Volume One

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

“If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn't seem that way. It's not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library -everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“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

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