Bob Dylan Quotes

“No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”

“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”

“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”

“The times they are a-changing.”

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”

“Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.”

“If you want to keep your memories, you first have to live them.”

“Don't criticize what you can't understand.”

“I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.”

“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”

“I don't have to know what a song means. I've written all kinds of things into my songs. And I'm not going to worry about it — what it all means.”

“These songs of mine, I think of as mystery plays, the kind Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they're on the fringes now. And they sound like they've been traveling on hard ground.”

“I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”

“If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon.”

“I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head — the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries — and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day.”

“As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves.”

“These songs didn't come out of thin air. I didn't just make them up out of whole cloth. It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock 'n' roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs.”

“I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I'm a religious person. I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination.”