Bob Dylan Quotes

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.

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.

It's not to anybody's best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.

The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out, and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much.

When I first heard Elvis's voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock and roll religion as it exists in today's form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. I think for a long time that freedom to me was Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.' I thank God for Elvis.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. Anybody who could possibly call himself a poet just cannot be a poet.

If the songs are dreamed, it's like my voice is coming out of their dream.

At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don't know. Lately if I read poems, it's like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare's sonnets I can hear a melody because it's all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, 'What kind of song would this be?'

I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.

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.

I kinda live where I find myself.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?

Ron Rosenbaum: Why are you doing what you're doing?
Bob Dylan: [Pause] Because I don't know anything else to do. I'm good at it.
Ron Rosenbaum: How would you describe "it"?
Bob Dylan: I'm an artist. I try to create art.

Greed and lust I can understand, but I can't understand the values of definition and confinement. Definition destroys. Besides, there's nothing definite in this world.

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