Bob Dylan Quotes

Hold it, Doc, a world war passed through my brain. He said, Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane.

And there's no one there to dry your tears. I could hold you for a million years. To make you feel my love.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.

The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time.

They can't hurt me. Sure, they can crush you and kill you. They can lay you out on 42nd and Broadway and put hoses on you and flush you in the sewers and put you on the subway and carry you out to Coney island and bury you on the Ferris wheel. But I refuse to sit here and worry about dying.

The song was there before me, before I came along. I just sorta came down and just sorta took it down with a pencil, but it was there before I came around.

Obscenity, who really cares. Propaganda, all is phony.

There would be brilliant songs, but, as [Bob] Dylan admitted on the recent Martin Scorsese documentary about him (No Direction Home), the specific muse that inspired "It's Alright Ma" would not return.

Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world has just gone on. I mean, look at Napoleon -but we went right on. Look at Harpo Marx -the world went around, it didn't stop for a second. It's sad but true. John Kennedy, right?

My love is like some raven at my window with a broken wing.

I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed... so drastically, I couldn't believe it myself.

Like the lion tears the flesh off a man, so can a woman who passes herself off as a male.

Everybody's wearing a disguise, to hide what they've got left behind their eyes.

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

Oh, time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies.

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.

May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true, May you always do for others And let others do for you. May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung, May you stay forever young.

I'm not a folk-singer. I just sing a certain place.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

I said, you know they refused Jesus, too. He said, you're not him.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

If you can't lend a hand, then get out of the way.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

The people in my songs are all me.

If you don't underestimate me, I won't underestimate you.

I've never been able to understand the seriousness of it all, the seriousness of pride. People talk, act, live as if they're never going to die. And what do they leave behind? Nothing. Nothing but a mask.

Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them, They sing while you slave and I just get bored

Why wait any longer for the one you love When he’s standing in front of you

Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the cost comes down, look out!

I've been sitting down studying the Art of Love. I think it will fit me like a glove.

In another lifetime she must have owned the world, or been faithfully wed to some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.

It's always disappointing when people decide for one reason or another that they don't like your work anymore, but you can't try to please people, because then you're just going to be doing - you'll never live it down, y'know it'll always be dogging you around - you might be being a fake about the whole thing.

I really don't like to hurt myself. I have a good understanding with all the women who have been in my life, whether I see them occasionally or not.

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 any one but inspire them?

Satan will give you a little taste, then he'll move in with rapid speed.

There are things I could say. But I don't.

Now the wintertime is coming The windows are filled with frost I went to tell everybody But I could not get across Well, I wanna be your lover, baby I don't wanna be your boss Don't say I never warned you When your train gets lost.

Don't put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist.

America was founded on the backs of slaves.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.

When you think that you lost everything you find out you can always lose a little more.

Bullets can harm you and death can disarm you, but no, you will not be deceived. Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt, you can give but you cannot receive.

I met a young man who was wounded in love, I met another man who was wounded in hatred.

What politics I ever learned, I learned in the streets, because it was part of the environment.

Trying to create a next world war, he found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor, he said I never engaged in this kind of thing before, but yes I think it can be very easily done.