Bob Dylan Quotes

You have to look at every one of your songs and be able to identify with them in a meaningful way. You can hardly sing your songs unless you're in them. If you want to fake it, go ahead. Fake it if you want. But I'm not that kind of singer.

I've always been the kind of person that doesn't like to trespass, but sometimes you just find yourself over the line.

Well, you always know who you are. I just don't know who I'm gonna become.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

There's danger in this open world where men strive to be free, and to me the greatest danger was in society.

I see the turning of the page, curtain rising on a new age, see the groom still waiting at the altar.

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

I play these [folk acoustic] concerts and I ask myself, 'Would you come see me tonight?' - and I'd have to answer truthfully, 'No, I wouldn't come. I'd rather be doin' something else, really I would. That something else is rock... The words are pictures, and the rock's gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures. (1965)

I was born a long way from where I belong and I am on my way home.

I realize I don't do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.

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.

May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.

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.

I ain't looking to compete with you, beat, or cheat, or mistreat you, simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you. All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.

There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.

I'm sick of giving creeps money off my soul.

I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up... He’s just so damn effortless.

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.

Done so many evil things in the name of love, it's a crying shame. I never did see no fire that could put out a flame.

The government's not going to create jobs. It doesn't have to. People have to create jobs.

If you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise, just remind me to show you the scars.

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

Don't criticize what you can't understand.

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

Whenever anybody does something in a big way, it's always rejected at home and accepted someplace else.

Don't forget to support your public library.

Sometimes the silence can be like thunder.

I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds.

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.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular.

The tree of life is growing where the spirit never dies, and the bright light of salvation shines in dark and empty skies.

Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.

When you got nothing, you got nothin' to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks, you've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

My songs are personal music, they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.

There's a lot of false prophets around and that's the trouble. People say they think they know what's right and other people get people to follow them because they have a certain type of charisma, and there's always people willing to take over. People want a leader. And there will be more and more of them.

You'll never be greater than yourself.

When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud, I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.

The worth of things can't be measured by what they cost but by what the cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high, and that there are some things that will never wear out.

Silvio, I gotta go, find out something only dead men know.

I never could guess your weight, baby.

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.

Once I went into songwriting, I figured I had to - I couldn't be a hellfire rock 'n' roller. But I could write hellfire lyrics.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount, But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts.