Bob Dylan Quotes

I've met Bob Dylan's bodyguards, and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table, he's sadly mistaken.

Bob Dylan impresses me about as much as... well, I was gonna say a slug but I like slugs.

What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

Gordon Lightfoot has created some of the most beautiful and lasting music of our time. He is Bob Dylan's favorite singer/songwriter - high praise from the best of us, applauded by the rest of us.

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.

Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.

After Nashville sushi and a long debate on Bob Dylan, we went into Woodland Studios at 10 pm that night for a look around, and jammed for 5 hours solid.

But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty.

I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good.

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.

Songs are like fish. You just gotta have your line in the water. And it's a bad idea to fish downstream from Bob Dylan.

When I was a teenager, I had trouble getting a boyfriend, so I imagined Arthur Rimbaud or Bob Dylan as my boyfriend.

I had the only beard in the Western Hemisphere that made Bob Dylan's look good.

You can't criticize Bob Dylan's singing.

You have to respect Billy Joel as a brilliant poet. You can't tell me there's a better rock band ever than Led Zeppelin. And if you speak during the Eagles' "Last Resort," we're done. I'm just asking for seven minutes. This stuff really matters, you know.

Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad “Joey”, Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.

I listen to Radio 4 and put the iPod on shuffle.

I like the randomness of, say, the Stones, then something from Nina Simone, Nick Drake or Bob Dylan.

Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.

If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

At the end of the playback of the take of "Like A Rolling Stone", or actually during the thing, Bob Dylan said to the producer, turn up the organ. And Tom Wilson said, oh man, that guy's not an organ player. And Dylan said, I don't care, turn the organ up, and that's really how I became an organ player.

Bob Dylan is as influential as any artist that there has been.

[Bob] Dylan crashed his motorcycle in 1967, and almost died.

A few years ago, he referred to the experience as a "transfiguration."

Splashing about in mud in the cold is not my thing.

I made an attempt to go to the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1969 when Bob Dylan was playing, but we never made it. We hired a boat from Lymington, but got lost, and by the time we got there the music was over. I wasn't too sad, to be honest.

It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy.

Nina Simone was an entertainer. Bob Dylan was an entertainer. Anyone that can occupy a piece of music and make the air catch on fire at that moment is a true entertainer. That's how I view it. That's what I was meant to do. I love doing it. That's why I'm on earth.

I have Bob Dylan lyrics on my ribs. I'm a diehard Dylan fan, and my dad and I joke that if I ever met him, I'd have him sign his name right under my tattoo and then I'd run to the parlor to get his signature tattooed.

Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.

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

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

My musical influence is really from my father.

He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.

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

I am a critic who is pulled toward history.

But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.

The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.

I want to see Bob Dylan do sketch comedy. I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan.

If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

You could live in Winnipeg a thousand years and not meet Ringo, Paul McCartney, or Bob Dylan.