Quotes By Bob Dylan

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.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon.

There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground.

I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

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.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

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'm inconsistent, even to myself.

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.

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.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

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.

Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.

You can't do something forever.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

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 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 can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.