All doctrine is ultimately the death of joy - even when the doctrine is the elevation of the light above the serious, because joy is too varied and elusive ever to confine itself to one or the other.

Plenty more of the Nays sound perfectly sincere, though. They may genuinely dislike [Bob] Dylan; they may even enjoy or admire him, but just don't think he's all that. Fair enough. The reaction of such folk seems to be chiefly amazement tinged with befuddlement: they've given him what? You're kidding me.

The same is true of ranking him thus against any work of literature. [Bob Dylan] has been made, through no fault of his own, the object of odious tokenism.

[Bob] Dylan may, for whatever reasons of his own, do nothing of the sort with the Nobel committee. Up there on Parnassus, that is his unquestionable prerogative. But here on my anthill, it's mine to say: oh, do piss off, you ineffable snobs.

Lyrics should not need to stand on their own; many of [Bob] Dylan's do, but in common with other great lyricists, he has written plenty that falters on the page but soars in song.

Without music, there is not the faintest chance [Bob Dylan] words would now be garlanded as they are.

On another front of the category-error argument are the insufferable fogeys who think the [Nobel] award is an outrage upon literature itself. That the problem is not simply a mistake may have been made about definitions, but that awful vulgarians are encroaching upon their sacred places. [Bob] Dylan, to them, is the harbinger of the low-culture mob; the latest in an unending number of final straws, or the thin end of a wedge that never seems to get thicker.