- I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
- 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 feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it
- don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a
- The radio makes hideous sounds.
- What good are fans? You can't eat applause for breakfast. You can't sleep with it.
- Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.
- People today are still living off the table scraps of the '60s. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
- People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
- Money doesn't talk, it swears.
- Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.
- Maybe in the '90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the '80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.
- If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.
- It rubs me the wrong way, a camera . . . It's a frightening thing . . . Cameras make ghosts out of people.
- 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.
- I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.
- I say there're no depressed words, just depressed minds.
- I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
- 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 the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there's some kind of change.
- 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.
- I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
- A poem is a naked person . . . Some people say that I am a poet.
- All I can do is be me, whoever that is.
- All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
- I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
- Chaos is a friend of mine.
- Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere.
- 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 mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
- Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.
- Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.
- At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.
- I've only written four songs in my whole life, but I've written those four songs a million times.
- I wasn't a good husband . . . I don't even know what a good husband is.
- [on his song "Everything Is Broken"] Critics usually don't like a song like this coming out of me because it didn't seem to be autobiographical. Maybe not, but the stuff I write does come from an autobiographical place.
- [when asked what his songs are "about"] Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.
- [from his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys in 1991] Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say, "Son," he said, "you know it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways.
- I know there are groups at the top of the charts that are hailed as the saviors of rock 'n' roll and all that, but they are amateurs. They don't know where the music comes from . . . I wouldn't even think about playing music if I was born in these times . . . I'd probably turn to something like mathematics. That would interest me. Architecture would interest me. Something like that.
- They'd like to use my tunes for different beer companies and perfumes and automobiles. I get approached on all that stuff. But, shit, I didn't write them for that reason. That's never been my scene.
- You can't be wise and in love at the same time.
- I can move, and fake. I know some of the tricks and it all applies artistically, not politically or philosophically.
- [on the legendary Woodstock Festival] I didn't want to be part of that thing. I liked the town. I felt they exploited the shit out of that, going up there and getting 15 million people all in the same spot. That don't excite me. The flower generation - is that what it was? I wasn't into that at all. I just thought it was a lot of kids out and around wearing flowers in their hair taking a lot of acid.
- [on a visit to Israel in the early 1970s] There was no great significance to that visit, but I'm interested in the fact that Jews are Semites, like Babylonians, Hittites, Arabs, Syrians, Ethiopians. But a Jew is different because a lot of people hate Jews. There's something going on here that's hard to explain.
- Those are songs from the Tree of Life. There's no love on the Tree of Life. Love is on the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil. So we have a lot of songs in popular music about love. Who needs them? Not you, not me. You can use love in a lot of ways in which it will come back to hurt you. Love is a democratic principle. It's a Greek thing.
- The bootleg records, those are outrageous. I mean, they have stuff you do in a phone booth. Like, nobody's around. If you're just sitting and strumming in a motel, you don't think anybody's there, you know . . . it's like the phone is tapped and then it appears on a bootleg record. With a cover that's got a picture of you taken from underneath your bed and it's got a striptease-type title and it costs $30. Amazing. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.
- You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
- [about Woody Guthrie] His influence on me was never in inflection or in voice. What drew me to was that hearing his voice, I could tell he was very lonesome, very alone and very lost in his time. That's why I dug him.
- [1966] It's the thing to do, to tell all the teeny-boppers, "I dig The Beatles" and you sing a song like "Yesterday" or "Michelle". Hey, God knows, it's such a cop-out, man, both of those songs. If you go into the Library of Congress, you'll find stuff a lot better than that. There are millions of songs like "Michelle" or "Yesterday" written in Tin Pan Alley.
- I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.
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