Top 131 Dylan Quotes

I don’t know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.

As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.

It’s not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don’t forget things like that.

I think Alison Krauss is one of the most amazing singers ever. As a songwriter – this is gonna sound cheesy – I love Randy Newman. And my mom passed on a love of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. At one point I was so into the Indigo Girls, just like I was so into the Dixie Chicks, those female harmonies.

You listen to Bob Dylan and you can’t help but think of the 60s, it’s very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the music doesn’t come from them it comes from the universe and it’s to be shared. At best, we’re skilled presenters, and I say that at best.

Bob Dylan has always sealed his decisions with the unexplainable. His motives for withholding the release of the magnificent ‘Basement Tapes’ will be as forever obscure as Brian Wilson’s reasons for the destruction of the tapes for ‘Smile.’

In some of the greatest recordings ever made, the performance is a part of the recording. Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35’ is all about the esthetic of that performance. You can hear the room.

Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, ‘Okay, here’s another great record by Bob Dylan; here’s another great record by Led Zeppelin.’

I don’t care if it’s a Cole Porter song, or George Gershwin, or Lennon/McCartney, or Elton John, or you know, whoever, Bob Dylan. Great songs are great songs, and they stand the test of time, and they can be interpreted and recorded with many points of view, but yet still retain the essence of what makes them good songs.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we’re living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It’s that level.

There’s that Bob Dylan quote: ‘He who’s not busy being born is busy dying.’ That’s a great line. And I really believe that.

Judy Garland, Doris Day, and Gene Kelly were all big influences growing up from all of the films. I’m also a huge folk music fan – Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan have influenced a lot of how music can inspire change in our world.

I had – along with my singing and dancing, I was very happy to be born in the hometown of Dylan Thomas. So the government was financing dramatic groups and amateur dramatics and stuff like that.

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

It’s insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it’s assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It’s that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he’s telling you something about his own life. It’s so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

Sometimes you just can’t walk away from films you’re offered, like the Dylan Thomas thing.

I’ve had mentors who were kind of the troubadour singer-songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and that’s just what I’ve always liked – people who would talk real honestly about their lives and their circumstance.

When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that’s what other people who I admired did. That’s what Bob Dylan did, that’s what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways.

I’ve grown up on American songwriters my whole life – listening to Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and people like John Prine – you know, classic, real songwriters. They’ve been the lion’s share of what I’ve really focused on as a writer and as influences, too.

I was a huge Beatles fan. The Stones, Dylan. Later on, I got into Stevie Wonder, and Bill Withers – he’s one of my heroes. Al Green, too.

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

I can’t do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do – to do imagery. I’m not good at that. I just write from the heart.

My expectations for myself were never high. I had a very unusual way of writing songs and of thinking about music. I wasn’t at all like Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel. I was completely different – I didn’t have a David Geffen at my side.

I grew up on, and kind of came of age, during the grunge movement and was introduced to Neil Young and Bob Dylan and grew up on that path.

The early Bob Dylan was compulsively drawn to the conflict between stability and the search for immortality.

I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.

I still listen to a lot of the classics from Bob Dylan and John Martin, but I love electronic music as well. I’m a big fan of an Australian DJ and producer called Flume, who I think is incredible. He should be more successful in the U.K.!

I think the height of ridiculousness was when I was playing Elizabeth in ‘The Golden Age’ while preparing to start shooting ‘I’m Not There.’ I literally finished filming Elizabethan grandeur on Friday, flew to Montreal, and started being Bob Dylan on Monday.

People often ask us if we had direct influences. Honestly, just a lot of different music – not necessarily individual people. We listen to anything from Bob Dylan to Massive Attack to Aerosmith to En Vogue. We very much enjoy all that music.

The more you know about Bob Dylan, the less you know. A truly enigmatic artist, Mr. Dylan’s work and life offer vaporous handholds, explanations, and instructions. Attempt to grasp them, and they will only dissipate and re-form into another contexture or idea.

I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs to see how he works. I’ve gotten into writing story-songs.

To us, there was Bob Dylan, and there was dad. As for what he meant to other people, that was never glorified in our house. There were no accolades there, no gold records.

The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.

The audiences used to say, ‘Are you a Donovan fan or a Dylan fan?’ It was all very naive, really.

Without people like Dylan and the Beatles and people like Paul Simon, I think rock n’ roll would have died out like Dixieland jazz.

The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn’t kick me out of his class. He turned me on to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’ I had picked up Dylan with ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn’t heard.

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He’s not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

Most people think that I heard Bob Dylan first and got a cap and harmonica. Really, it was Woody Guthrie. He was so influential.

It’s not my concern to make a commercial pop record. I want to make a record of music that I would listen to, that is lyrically rich and has songs that people can relate to – more along the Jakob Dylan route: people who create for the art of it and not necessarily the monetary rewards of it.

Townes Van Zandt ranks alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan. He inspired so many songwriters to shoot for something that’s timeless.

When I was around 12, my heroes were Cindy Sherman and Bob Dylan and Samuel Westing from the kids’ novel ‘The Westing Game’.

I was buying Bob Dylan mainly, everything I could get hold of by him.

Well, I met Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan in the space of 15 minutes. Frank Sinatra kissed me on the lips. He kissed me on the lips. And then he gave me a filterless cigarette. And then I met Bob Dylan. I came off all lightheaded and had to go sit on his dressing-room steps.

In New York, I’m around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.

By 27, Bob Dylan had already written ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ the Beatles had released ‘Rubber Soul,’ Bruce Springsteen had recorded ‘Born to Run’ and U2 had delivered ‘The Joshua Tree.’

We say, ‘Wow, look at Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Their clothes were always so cool.’ Maybe not Mick Jagger when he wore Spandex in the ’80s.

Dylan’s relationship with Johnny Cash was the biggest influence on Nashville in my lifetime – they opened up country music.

I’ve never bought a Dylan record. A singing poet? It just bores me to tears. I’ve got to tell you, if I had 10 Dylans in the final of ‘American Idol,’ we would not be getting 30 million viewers a week. I don’t believe the Bob Dylans of this world would make ‘American Idol ‘a better show.