Bob Dylan Quotes

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

There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They have got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.

You can't be wise and in love at the same time. – Bob Dylan, No Direction Home (2005) Directed by Martin Scorsese.

That ear - I mean, Jesus, he's got to will that to the Smithsonian.

Scratch utters the lines: 'I know there is evil in the world - essential evil, not the opposite good or the defective of good but something to which good itself is an irrelevance - a fantasy. No one can live as long as I have, hear what I have heard and not know that. I know too - more precisely - I am ready to belive that there may be something in the world - someone, if you prefer - that purpose evil, that intends it... powerful nations suddenly, without occasion, without apparent cause... decay. Their children turn against them. Their women lose their sense of being a woman. Their families disintegrate.' From there on it only gets better

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.

It's easier to be me than someone else. But just like most famous people, I just want to be left alone most of the time.

I find it easy to write songs. I been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren't written out just for the paper; they're written as you can read it, you dig. If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can't do that with either—songs that, if you took the beat and the melody away, they wouldn't stand up because they're not supposed to do that, you know. Songs are songs.

I don't know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. [...] After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back.

I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see Creation just about everywhere. The highest form of song is prayer. King David's, Solomon's, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the Earth.

"But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer."

What is it about lapsing into narration in a song that makes you think the singer is suddenly revealing the truth?

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

But I'll know my song well before I start singin

Here's your throat back, thanks for the loan.