Bob Dylan Quotations | Page 6

People think they know me from my songs. But my repertoire of songs is so wide-ranging that you'd have to be a madman to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs.

A lot of people say there is no happiness in this life, and certainly there's no permanent happiness. But self-sufficiency creates happiness. Happiness is a state of bliss. Just because you're satisfied one moment - saying yes, it's a good meal, makes me happy - well, that's not going to necessarily be true the next hour. Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner. Time is your soul mate. Children are happy. But they haven't really experienced ups and downs yet. I'm not exactly sure what happiness even means. I don't know if I personally could define it.

Along with some of the worst music of Bob Dylan's career ("Self-Portrait," 1970), this period produced some gems - including many songs recorded with The Band in '67 but not released until years later.

Bob Dylan wasn't a big star early on; it was the release of his Greatest Hits album in 1967, and the mainstream success of the stoner anthem "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" ("Everybody must get stoned!"), that really put him on the mainstream map.

You have to know that you're the best whether anybody else tells you that or not. And that you'll be around, in one way or another, longer than anybody else. Somewhere inside of you, you have to believe that.

You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more

Ironically, this was Bob Dylan's period [1967-74] of greatest fame.

Either I'm too sensitive, or else I'm gettin' soft

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Just in time for Bob Dylan to recoil from the attention, leave the city for Woodstock, and turn his back on fame.

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.

It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be...

God, I'm glad I'm not me.

It goes back to the destiny thing.I made a bargain with it, you know, a long time ago. And I'm holding up my end.

I'd been going though his trash. He knocked me down. I was glad to see him, even though he was banging my head against the sidewalk. Afterwards these bums come over and say, 'Did he get much money?' I say, 'Money'? That was Bob Dylan.

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes, blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn, "Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm."

The purpose of music is to elevate the spirit and inspire. Not to help push some product down your throat. It puts you in tune with your own existence. Sometimes you really don't know how you feel, but really good music can define how you feel... someone who's telling me where he's been that I haven't and what it's like there - somebody whose life I can feel...

Bob has never written a bad song. Bob Dylan is a genius.

If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.

I feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet, putting her in a wheel-barrow and wheeling her down the street.

They say everything can be replaced, Yet every distance is not near. So I remember every face Of every man who put me here. I see my light come shining From the west unto the east. Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.

I never wanted to be a prophet or a saviour. Elvis maybe

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

I have always believed that fame is a curse. I never envied one of the famous people I've known.

What drives me to you, drives me insane.

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through.

It was [meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy] like looking at my mirror image.

Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.

Steal a little, and they put you in jail. Steal a lot, and they make you king.

Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.

Ah, current music. What would that be? Ah, really, a lot of it sounds defective to me. It makes me restless.

Everything passes, Everything changes, Just do what you think you should do.

Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.

Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner. Really, time is your soul mate.

People do whatever they want to do, y'know.

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's AT somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright.

Your mind is a your temple, keep it beautiful and free. Don't let an egg get laid in it by something you can't see.

Creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won't invite what's not there to begin with.

I just don't hear anyone else making the music I'm making in my head, so I'll have to do it myself.

There is nothing so stable as change.

There's beauty in the silver singing river There's beauty in the sunrise in the sky But none of these and nothing else can match the beauty That I remember in my true love's eyes

There were only a few seats left in coach and Bob found himself seated next to a young female fan. 'I can't believe I'm sitting next to Bob Dylan!' she screamed.'Pinch yourself,' said Bob."

I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame And every time I pass that way I always hear my name

If you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure

Passion is a young man’s game. Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise. I mean, you’re around awhile, you leave certain things to the young. Don’t try to act like you’re young. You could really hurt yourself.

Everybody's the first somebody, y'know.

A cat's meow and cow's moo, I can recite them all.

Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution.

Whatever people see - TV in my mind forms people's opinions.

What kind of alchemy could create a perfume that would make a reaction to a person lukewarm, indifferent and apathetic?If such a scent could be made I'd like some.

People disagreeing everywhere you look makes you wanna stop and read a book.

The picture you have in your mind of what you're about will come true.

The exploitation and superficiality of mainstream America is the object not of [Bob] Dylan's hipster scorn, but of an apocalyptic parable of holy fools and righteous thieves - the kind of imagery that Dylan's later work would explore more fully.

And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.

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.

Get jailed, jump bail, join the Army if you fail.

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.

Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.

Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards

You don't write a song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it.

... When it came time to hire a guitar player ... I didn't even have to think about it ... Mike Bloomfield was the best guitar player I'd ever heard...

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.

I don't want no pickle. Just want to ride my motorcycle.

I dug it, New York City, all-the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walkups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York.

Whatever that ["transfiguration" by Bob Dylan] means, it's true that the poetic brilliance of the early career would never really reappear.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

"Like a Rolling Stone" [of Bob Dylan] is a kiss-off song like none before or since.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" [of Bob Dylan] captures, in word-salad format, life in an encroaching police state.

May you have a strong foundation when the winds of change shift...and may you be forever young.

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

You can't be wise and in love at the same time.

For them that must obey authority/That they do not respect in any degree/Who despise their jobs, their destinies/Speak jealously of them that are free

What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?

One night around that time, at Hammersmith, Bob Dylan was about to go into [his 1963 classic] 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.He said, 'Hey, Bucky! Play mandolin on this.' I am not really a mandolin player; I could only play in certain keys. Halfway through, he stops the band, turns to the audience and points to me. He says: 'He isn't playing, he's miming.' And then: 'Should I fire him?' The whole audience yells.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you.

Music attracts the angels in the universe.

The future for me is already a thing of the past - You were my first love and you will be my last

Fame it's like... When you look through a window, say you pass a little pub, or an inn. You look through the window and you see people talking and carrying on. You,can watch outside the window and see them all being very real with each other. But when you walk into the room, it's over. I don't pay any attention to it.

May you stay Forever Young

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

There are those who worship loneliness, I'm not one of them In this age of fiberglass I'm searching for a gem The crystal ball up on the wall hasn't shown me nothing yet I've paid the price of solitude, but at last I'm out of debt

You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.

If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

"Tangled Up in Blue," shifts perspective several times during the song to tell a "tangled" version of [Bob] Dylan's marriage and dissolution.

DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.

Don't forget to support your public library.

Somebody had to be Bob Dylan. I guess I was best equipped to do the job.

After becoming famous once again - a 1976 song, "Hurricane," even marked a return to protest songwriting - [Bob] Dylan got addicted to drugs, found Jesus, left Jesus, and put out a lot of swill.

Every step of the way we walk the line Your days are numbered, so are mine Time is pilin' up, we struggle and we scrape We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape

the only thing i knew how to do was to keep on keeping on

If I had wings, no one would ask me: should I fly?