Bob Dylan Quotes

When You Cease To Exist, Then Who Will You Blame?

They already expect you to just give a check to tax-deductible charity organization.

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants too
Outside in the distance, a wild cat did growl
Two riders were approaching. The wind began to howl.

My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is... Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship
My senses have been stripped
My hands can't feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering
I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade
Cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.

You can hurt someone and not even know it

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon.

I'm the oldest son of a crazy man, I'm in a cowboy band.

Environment affects me a great deal. A lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: `Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work.' I don't recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it's in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn't let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time...

The inside story on a man was that if he wanted to be successful, he must become a rugged individualist, but then should make some adjustments.

My songs aren’t dreams. They’re more of a responsive nature…

To me, when you need them, they appear. Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.

It is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned slowly into autumn.

"God said: "Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said: "Man, you must be putting me on." God said: "No." Abe said: "What" God said: "You can do what you want Abe but the next time you see me coming you'd better run". Abe said: "Where you want this killing done?" God said: "Out on Highway 61."

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.