Bob Dylan Quotations | Page 7

The world of research has gone berserk. Too much paper work.

You say you've lost your faith But that's not where it's at You have no faith to lose and you know it

Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can't make up their minds and neither can I.

An artist has got to be constantly in a state of becoming.

It was better to be in chains with friends than in a garden with strangers. [An ancient Persian proverb.] So true, huh?

The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts, eating the same food. Everything is processed.

My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect.

The times they are a-changing.

May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong, may you stay forever young.

The "joker" here ["All Along the Watchtower" ] is the older [Bob] Dylan himself, whining about exploitation, and the thief's rejoinder re-contextualizes the earlier critique into the religious frames that would become more prominent as time went on.

every pleasure's got an edge of pain, pay your ticket and don't complain

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.

You'll never be greater than yourself.

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth. You're an idiot babe, it's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free...

they say every man needs protection, they say every man must fall. yet I swear I see my reflection,some place high above this wall.....and someday I shall be released.

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

In 1975,Bob Dylan was almost 10 years past his prime - and then he released the best album of his career, Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded amid a painful divorce, Blood on the Tracks is proof that heartbreak makes great art - just as many of the albums that followed were the opposite.

Gonna change my way of thinking, make my self a different set of rules. Gonna put my good foot forward and stop being influenced by fools.

Bent out of shape from society's pliers, cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the hole that he's in.

All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now.

[Bob Dylan] was rarely tender and seldom reached out to anticipate another's needs.

Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand, For the times they are a-changin'.

If you wanted to, it would be easy to find some crappy lyrics [of Bob Dylan] from the Eighties to undermine the Nobel Prize.

I hurt easy, I just don't show it. You can hurt someone and not even know it.

The people in my songs are all me.

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

[Bob] Dylan's broken-heart songs are so much better. Like "Simple Twist of Fate".

Chaos is a friend of mine.

Bob Dylan was again an entirely new person - this time old, craggy, cynical, and world-weary, as in "Not Dark Yet".

The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots.

I can't see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That's terrible.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, they're drinking, thinking that they got it made. Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things, but you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it, babe.

Popular music had never had lyrical sophistication of this type [like Bob Dylan]; wit, to be sure, but "Darkness at the break of noon/Shadows even the silver spoon/The handmade blade, the child's balloon/Eclipses both the sun and moon/To understand you know too soon/ There is no sense in trying"? No.

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I'm not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I've never thought about that before! He said, When you're not following me, you're resisting me.

The radio makes hideous sounds.

The worth of things can't be measured by what they cost but by what the cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high, and that there are some things that will never wear out.

A brilliant 1989 album, Oh Mercy; some career retrospectives; and two albums of American folk songs, with just Bob Dylan and his guitar and harmonica. All that culminated in the Grammy-winning comeback album, Time Out of Mind (1997). Once again, just as Dylan seemed to be out of it, he was back at the top of his game.

You don't have to be afraid of looking into my face. We've done nothing to each other that time will not erase.

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

...how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they're forever banned?

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.

Rod's a great singer. He's got a great voice, but there's no point to put a 30-piece orchestra behind him. I'm not going to knock anybody's right to make a living but you can always tell if somebody's heart and soul is into something, and I didn't think Rod was into it in that way.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.

When I was growing up - say in the fifties - the thirties to me didn't even exist. I couldn't even imagine them in any kind of way, so I don't expect anyone growing up now is gonna even understand what the sixties were all about, anymore than I could the thirties or twenties.

Why Nicolas Sarkozy is the head of France, [he is] warm and extremely likeable.

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.

Frank [Sinatra] sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards. I never wanted to be a singer that sings at somebody. I've always wanted to sing to somebody. I would have gotten that subliminally from Frank many years ago. Hank Williams did that, too. He sang to you.

A lot of people from the press want to talk to me, but they never do.

Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up?

I don't think there's enough guns.

But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned.

Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The new order is Rapidly fadin'. And the first one now Will later be last For the times they are a-changin'.

And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself. p.71

let me forget about today until tomorrow

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.

How many roads must a man walk down.. Before you can call him a Man..

His [Bob Dylan] humour was dry and splendid.

I kinda live where I find myself.

There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief...

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.

Your heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark.

Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.

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

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.

How does it feel, how does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.

Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky.

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

You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody...

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.

Don't follow leaders.

Gotta head full of ideas that are driving me insane...

One should never be where one does not belong.

Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul

It's hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.

All the money you made will never buy back your soul.

May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.

We have never arrived. We are in a constant state of becoming.

Call me any name you like I will never deny it.

Look out your window, and I'll be gone. You're the reason I'm a-traveling on...

On the cliffs of your wild cat charms I'm riding.

How many roads must a man walk down Before your can call him a man? . . . The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.

I don't have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven't. I've had just as many as anybody else, but I haven't had them in a long time.

Some are masters of illusions, some are ministers of trade, all under the same delusion, all their beds unmade.

Without freedom of speech, I might be in the swamp

Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore.

You will find God in the church of your choice.

You five and ten cent women with nothing in your heads, I got a real gal I'm loving and Lord I'll love her 'til I'm dead.

The pump don't work cause the vandals took the handle

So now I'm going back again I got to get her somehow All the people we used to know They're an illusion to me now Some are mathematicians Some are carpenter's wives Don't know how it all got started I don't what they're doing with their lives But me I'm still on the road Heading for another joint We always did feel the same We just saw it from a different point of view Tangled up in Blue.

I'm a liberal to a degree, I want everybody to be free. But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater move in next door.

If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it... you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one's ever done it better.

I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.

Can't keep track of it no more, son's becoming husbands to their mothers, and old men turning your daughters into whores.