Popular Quotes Through Time

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.

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.

Chaos is a friend of mine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but to inspire them?

When I first heard [Elvis Presley's] voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody; and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.

The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the "Blonde on Blonde" album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly I've been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ.