Bob Dylan Quotations | Page 5

You'll find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom.

He gambled all his life, he's got 27 children, yet he's never had a wife.

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

You'll find God in the church of your choice, you'll find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital.

Mama, put my guns in the ground, I can't shoot them anymore. That long black cloud is coming down.

Ring the bells for the blind and deaf.

We're living in times where men commit crimes and crime don't have a face.

They're selling postcards of the hanging.

The inmates and prisoners, I found they were my kind, and it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind.

The only sound that's left after the ambulances go is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.

You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.

Too much information about nothing.

They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives, put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs, or their wives.

All that foreign oil controlling American soil.

Anger and jealousy's all that he sells us, he's content when you're under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark.

Don't know which one is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool.

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

Fortune or fame, you must pick one or the other, though neither of them are to be what they claim.

In this age of fiberglass, I'm searching for a gem.

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

Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.

The good Samaritan, he's getting dressed, he's getting ready for the show. He's going to the carnival tonight on Desolation Row.

Everyone of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed, dignity never been photographed.

The dirt of gossip blows into my face and the dust rumors cover me. But if the arrow is straight and the point is slick, it can pierce through dust no matter how thick.

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

It's not important what other people call you. If you yourself know you're a fake, that's tougher to live with.

I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.

Every singer has three or four or five techniques, and you can force them together in different combinations. Some of the techniques you discard along the way, and pick up others. But you do need them. It's just like anything. You have to know certain things about what you're doing that other people don't know. Singing has to do with techniques and how many you use at the same time. One alone doesn't work. There's no point to going over three. But you might interchange them whenever you feel like it. It's a bit like alchemy.

I used to think it's better if you just live and die and no one knows who you are.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through.

Sometimes you get out from behind the wheel and let someone else step on the gas.

The more you act the further you get away from the truth.

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.

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.

I'm good with songs I haven't written, if I like them. I'm glad I didn't write any of them. I already know how they go, so I have more freedom with them. I understand these songs. I've known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I'm not coming to them like a stranger.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about. They're an escape.

I like spiritual songs. They struck me as truthful and serious. They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment.

I used to play hockey when I was growing up. Everyone sort of learns how to skate and play hockey at an early age.

I always thought the best kind of sunglasses are the motorcycle helmets with the black plastic masks on them. That way, nobody can recognize the back of your head either.

When I think of mystery, I don't think about myself. I think of the universe, like why does the moon rise when the sun falls? Caterpillars turn into butterflies? I really haven't remained a recluse.

Recording studios are filled with technology. They are set in their ways. And to update them means you'd have to change them back. That would be my idea of upgrading. And this will never happen. As far as I know, recording studios are booked all the time. So obviously people like all the improvements. The more technically advanced they are, the more in demand they become.

I need all kinds of songs - fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas - and they all get juggled around during a live show. I've been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I'm always starting with that.

Being singer is different than being an actor, where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you're in. But an actor is pretending to be somebody, a singer isn't. And that's the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there's very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn't leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity.

You just have to keep going to find that thing that lets you in the door. Sometimes in life when that day comes and you're given the key, you throw it away.

Romance never does go out of fashion. It's radical. But it's out of step with the current media culture.

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.

You travel the world, you go see different things. I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I'll go - I mean, even if it's in a different language. I don't care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I've seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It's like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else, somebody has a great version.

I don't usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships.

Everything's a business. Love, truth, beauty. Conversation is a business. Spirituality is not a business, so it's going to go against the grain of people who are trying to exploit other people.

Most songs have bridges in them, to distract listeners from the main verses of a song so they don't get bored. My songs don't have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them.

Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it's usually the key to the whole song. It's the idea that matters. It's like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.

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.

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

Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radio/record player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing.

We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, "My character this, and my character that." Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me.

People talk about Frank [Sinatra] all the time - and they should talk about Frank - but he had the greatest arrangers. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards.

I want to use songs that everybody knows or thinks they know. I want to show them a different side of it and open up that world in a more unique way. You have to believe what the words are saying and the words are as important as the melody. Unless you believe the song and have lived it, there's little sense in performing it. I never wanted to be a singer that

Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this. All my songs have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore. But it can't be wrong to try.

Having hits buries a singer in the past. A lot of singers hide in the past because it's safer back there. If you've ever heard today's country music, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I come from way north. We'd listen to radio shows all the time. I think I was the last generation, or pretty close to the last one, that grew up without TV.

I like the fans, but I don't feel an obligation that I have to be an example to them, like say maybe a baseball player would, or a football player or maybe some other type of musicians. I don't feel I have to really set an example that somebody else has to live up to.

People's lives are filled with vice and the trappings of it. Ambition, greed and selfishness all have to do with vice. Sooner or later, you have to see through it or you don't survive.

We don't see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it - everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life.

I think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop.

I never did use earphones until into the Eighties or Nineties. I don't like to use earphones. I've never heard anybody sing with earphones effectively. They just give you a false sense of security. A lot of us don't need earphones. I don't think Springsteen or Mick do. But other people more or less have given in. But they ought not to. They don't need to. Especially if they have a good band.

In my childhood everything you heard, you could imagine what it looked like. Even singers that I would hear on the radio, I couldn't see what they looked like, so I imagined what they looked like. What they were wearing. What their movements were. Gene Vincent? When I first pictured him, he was a tall, lanky blond-haired guy.

Up north, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials that played pre-rock 'n' roll things - country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin' Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn't even know where Alabama was.

People think that singing and playing is easy. It's not. It's easy to strum along, but if you actually want to really play, where it's important, that's a hard thing and not too many people are good at it.

Some of the old folk singers used to phrase things in an interesting way, and then, I got my style from seeing a lot of outdoor-type poets, who would recite their poetry. When you don't have a guitar, you recite things differently, and there used to be quite a few poets in the jazz clubs, who would recite with a different type of attitude.

There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It's hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.

I can picture the color of the song, or the shape of it, or who it is that I'm trying to appeal to, in the song, and what I'm trying to, almost, reinforce my feelings for. And I know that sounds sort of vague and abstract, but I've got a handle on it when I'm doing it.

A lot of people say there is no happiness in this life and certainly there's no permanent happiness. But self-sufficiency creates happiness.

Once you think you know the song, then you have go and see how other people have done it.

You have to work out where your place is. And who you are. But we're all spirit. That's all we are, we're just walking dressed up in a suit of skin, and we're going to leave that behind.

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work.

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king.

Sometimes I'm thinkin' I'm Too high to fall Other times I'm thinkin' I'm So low I don't know If I can come up at all

[Bob] Dylan crashed his motorcycle in 1967, and almost died. A few years ago, he referred to the experience as a "transfiguration."

May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true. May you always know the truth and see the lights surrounding you. May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong. May you stay forever young.

Happiness is not on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things. If I'm happy, I'm happy - and if I'm not, I don't know the difference. Knowing that you are the person you were put on this earth to be - that's much more important than just being happy.

There's not even room enough to be anywhere/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.../I was born here and I'll die here against my will/I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still

Dealing with my own life takes priority over other people dealing with my life.

Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.

If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.

Shadows are falling and I've been here all day/It's too hot to sleep, time is running away/Feel like my soul has turned into steel/I've still got the scars that the sun didn't heal

People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.

No reason to get excited,' the thief, he kindly spoke, There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.

Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content.

In the meantime [1965-67], [Bob] Dylan was again writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."

How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?

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.

Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb/I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from/Don't even hear a murmur of a prayer/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

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.

In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn't see and weren't there for, and you have to do it as if you were.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time, Some of the people can be all right part of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. 'I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,' I said that.

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.