A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.
A lot of people can’t stand touring but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.
A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing.
A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.
A song is anything that can walk by itself.
All I can do is be me, whoever that is.
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.
At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.
Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.
Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
Being on tour is like being in limbo. It’s like going from nowhere to nowhere.
But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
Chaos is a friend of mine.
Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.
Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.
Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.
Don’t matter how much money you got, there’s only two kinds of people: there’s saved people and there’s lost people.
Folk music is a bunch of fat people.
Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.
He not busy being born is busy dying.
Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.
I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.
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.
I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.
I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.
I can’t act!
I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.
I can’t stand to see myself on television.
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.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.
I don’t think I’ve ever been an agnostic. I’ve always thought there’s a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there’s a world to come.
I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.
I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.
I have dined with kings, I’ve been offered wings. And I’ve never been too impressed.
I kinda live where I find myself.
I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
I never saw myself as a folk singer.
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.
I realize I don’t do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.
I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.
I say there’re no depressed words just depressed minds.
I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed… so drastically, I couldn’t believe it myself.
I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.
I think I have a dualistic nature.
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.
I’m inconsistent, even to myself.
I’m just glad to be feeling better. I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.
I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.
I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy.
I’m not a playwright.
I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something.
I’m sick of giving creeps money off my soul.
I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation.
I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.
If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.
In ceremonies of the horsemen, even the pawn must hold a grudge.
In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.
Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.
It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.
It’s not easy to define poetry.
Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.
Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there’s no fitting into it now.
Money doesn’t talk, it swears.
My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.
My range is limited.
My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.
No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.
Nothing can affect my voice, it’s so bad.
People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.
People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.
Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.
Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.
The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.
The people in my songs are all me.
The radio makes hideous sounds.
The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
There is nothing so stable as change.
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.
To live outside the law, you must be honest.
Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.
What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.
What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.
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.
When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?
Yesterday’s just a memory, tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be.
You call yourself what you want to call yourself.
You can’t be happy by doing something groovy.
You can’t do something forever.
You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.
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.
You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.
You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.
You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.
