Quotes By Bob Dylan

A song is like a dream, and you have to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter. You can write a song anywhere, in a railroad compartment, on a boat, on horseback -- it helps to be moving. Sometimes people who have the greatest talent for writing songs never write any because they are not moving.

A BIG PART OF SONGWRITING, like all writing, is editing-distilling thought down to essentials. Novice writers often hide behind filigree. In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid. As the old saying goes, an iceberg moves gracefully because most of it is beneath the surface.

The world don't need any more songs... As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer for it... There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated... Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

There was a lot of halting and waiting, little acknowledgment, little affirmation, but sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence.

I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. [...] After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

Music is truthful... Music attracts the angels in the universe.

Reading Clausewitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously.

If the measure of greatness is to gladden the heart of every human being on the face of the earth, then he truly was the greatest. In every way he was the bravest, the kindest and the most excellent of men.

Happiness is not on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things. If I'm happy, I'm happy - and if I'm not, I don't know the difference... Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be - that's much more important than just being happy.

I don't expect politicians to solve anybody's problems. We've got to take the world by the horns and solve our own problems. The world owes us nothing, each and every one of us, the world owes us not one single thing. Politicians or whoever.

Then you notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this. Poplar trees, the red butterflies, the fragile beauty of flowers, the sun-you see how nature is indifferent to it all.

You're born with the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.

I asked the guy who made the sound effects for the radio shows how he got the sound of the electric chair and he said it was bacon sizzling. What about broken bones? The guy took out a LifeSaver and crushed it between his teeth.

He asked me about my family. I told him about my grandma on my mom's side who lived with us. She was filled with nobility and goodness, told me once that happiness isn't on the road to anything. That happiness is the road. Had also instructed me to be kind because everyone you'll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.

He can afford to be unassuming because he has what it takes. A man with lightning in his pocket doesn't ever brag.

Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn' t want it in my house. Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him. It was a cruel horror of a joke. So much for the truth. I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing.

That's the problem with a lot of things these days. Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.

Conceit is not necessarily a disease. It's more of a weakness.

The chilling precision that these old-timers used in coming up with their songs was no small thing.

People don't value their obscurity. They don't know what it's like to have it taken away.