The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was in his first phase, updating and transforming American traditional music.

While [Bob] Dylan's folk fans thought he was selling out [in 1965-67], actually Dylan was lodging a stronger, deeper critique of American hypocrisy.

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.

[Bob] Dylan, like Johnny Cash and only a handful of others, simultaneously embodies the American dream and the harsh wake-up call that comes after it.

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

There’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.