You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.
— Bob Dylan
Nothing can affect my voice, it's so bad.
My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.
Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.
Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.
The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots.
It's not easy to define poetry.
Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.
A lot of people don't like the road, but it's as natural to me as breathing.
I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.
Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.
What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.
You can't be happy by doing something groovy.
You call yourself what you want to call yourself.
You can't do something forever.
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.
I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.
I kinda live where I find myself.
I realize I don't do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.
I can't stand to see myself on television.
Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.
I'm more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.
The people in my songs are all me.
You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.
I can't see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That's terrible.
I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.
Folk music is a bunch of fat people.
You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.
I'm sick of giving creeps money off my soul.
Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.
My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.
You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.
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.
A song is anything that can walk by itself.
It's hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.
I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed... so drastically, I couldn't believe it myself.
People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young.
My range is limited.
I think I have a dualistic nature.
I'm not a playwright.
Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.
I'm mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it's the only place where I'm happy.
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.
I never saw myself as a folk singer.
I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.
I'm not the kind of cat that's going to cut off an ear if I can't do something.
I can't act!
I really didn't consider myself happy or unhappy.
The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
I don't think I'm tangible to myself.
