Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941) is an American folk and rock singer-songwriter, born in Duluth, Minnesota. In 2016 Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

• Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.
  • Liner notes, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)

• Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.
  • "Only Human Driftin' And Learnin'" by Sidney Fields, New York Mirror (9 December 1963)

• There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.
  • Address to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (13 December 1963)

• I am a writer an a singer of the words I write I am no speaker nor any politician an my songs speak for me because I write them in the confinement of my own mind an have t cope with no one except my own self.
  • Letter sent to the ECLC after Dylan received the Tom Paine Award at the Bill of Rights dinner on December 13, 1963, as reported in "Mr. Dylan Regrets" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press (11 November 2005)

• do Not create anything, it will be
  misinterpreted. it will not change.
  it will follow you the rest of your life.
  • "Advice for Geraldine on Her Miscellaneous" (1964)

• a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet
  • Liner notes, Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

• He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.
  • When asked about the meaning of the song "Ballad of a Thin Man" during a 1965 interview.

• You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
  • Bob Dylan Interview by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston (1965)

• I find it easy to write songs. I been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren't written out just for the paper; they're written as you can read it, you dig. If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can't do that with either—songs that, if you took the beat and the melody away, they wouldn't stand up because they're not supposed to do that, you know. Songs are songs.
  • Interview with Paul Robbins (March, 1965)

• I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know there are some people terrified of the bomb, but there are others terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine. Experience teaches that silence terrifies the most.
  • As quoted in "Cosmo Listens to Records" by Nat Hentoff, in Cosmopolitan (November 1965)

• Reporter: How many people who labor in the same musical vineyard in which you toil - how many are protest singers? That is, people who use their music, and use the songs to protest the, uh, social state in which we live today: the matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be.
  Bob Dylan: Um...how many?
  Reporter: Yes. How many?
  Bob Dylan: Uh, I think there's about, uh...136.
  Reporter: You say about 136, or you mean exactly 136?
  Bob Dylan: Uh, it's either 136 or 142.
  • Press conference in Los Angeles, California (17 December 1965), as seen and heard in No Direction Home.

• Bob Dylan: I do know what my songs are about.
  Playboy: And what's that?
  Bob Dylan: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.
  • Playboy Interview (February 1966)

• Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges.
  • Playboy Interview (February 1966)

• I don't believe you! You're a liar! ... Play it fucking loud!
  • Dylan's response to the shout of "Judas" by a heckler, followed by his instructions to his band over the count-in to "Like A Rolling Stone." Heard on The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966

• Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.
  • Heard in the D. A. Pennebaker documentary Dont Look Back (1967)

• God, I'm glad I'm not me.
  • Said when reading a newspaper article about himself in Dont Look Back (1967)

• You have to be let alone to really accomplish anything.
  • Interview by Hubert Saal, "Dylan is Back," Newsweek (26 February 1968)

• I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don't believe that any more. There's myself and there's my song, which I hope is everybody's song.
  • Interview by Hubert Saal, "Dylan is Back," Newsweek (26 February 1968)

• My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.
  • The Rolling Stone Interview: Bob Dylan (29 November 1969)

• 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.
  • Neil Hickey TV Guide interview (11 September 1976)

• 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.
  • Playboy Interview (1978)

• I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
  • Interview with Robert Shelton, Melody Maker (29 July 1978)

• 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?
  • Bob Dylan: The Rolling Stone Interview by Jonathan Cott (26 January 1978)

• I kinda live where I find myself.
  • The Rolling Stone Interview: Bob Dylan (21 June 1984)

• 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.
  • Rolling Stone interview (21 June 1984)

• 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.
  • Interview with Bert Kleinman (30 July 1984). Cf. C. S. Lewis: "People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself."

• 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?'
  • Interview with Denise Worrell, "'It's All Right in Front': Dylan on Life and Rock" in Time (25 November 1985)

• Chaos is a friend of mine.
  • Newsweek (9 December 1985)

• I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
  • Interview published with the Biograph album set (1985)

• If the songs are dreamed, it's like my voice is coming out of their dream.
  • Quoted in Robert Shelton's No Direction Home (1986), p. 281

• 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.
  • Quoted in Robert Shelton's No Direction Home (1986), p. 353

• 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.
  • Us Weekly (24 August 1987); on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, as reported in Bob Dylan: Performing Artist 1986–1990 and Beyond, Mind out of Time (2009)

• 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.
  • Discussing the song "Like a Rolling Stone" in Rolling Stone magazine (1988)

• It's not to anybody's best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.
  • Bob Dylan: The Song Talk Interview by Paul Zollo (1991)

• 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.
  • Bob Dylan: The Song Talk Interview by Paul Zollo (1991)

• People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas.
  • The Guardian (13 February 1992)

• That ear - I mean, Jesus, he's got to will that to the Smithsonian.
  • In reference to Brian Wilson, Newsweek (1997)

• 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.
  • Dylan Revisited, Newsweek (1997)

• 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. I don't know who I am most of the time. It doesn't even matter to me.
  • Dylan Revisited, Newsweek (1997)

• I'm inconsistent, even to myself.
  • Quoted in "POP/JAZZ; A Wiser Voice Blowin' In the Autumn Wind" by Jon Pareles, The New York Times (28 September 1997)

• Bob Dylan: The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think of to write that you don't see every day in a newspaper or on television?
  Interviewer: ...Do you think that TV and the media have killed poetry and literature?
  Bob Dylan: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. ... What's a writer to do if every idea is exposed in the media before he can get to it or let it evolve? What's a writer gonna write about? ... We're living in a science-fiction world. We're living in a world that Disney has conquered. Disney's science fiction. Theme parks, trendy streets, it's all science fiction. So I would say, if a writer has got something to say, he'll have to do it in that–
  Interviewer: Outside of the real world?
  Bob Dylan: There is a real world. Science fiction has become the real world. Whether we realize it or not, it has.
  • The Rome Press Conference (23 July 2001)

• We may not be able to defeat these swine, but we don't have to join them.
  • As quoted in Kingdom of Fear (2003) by Hunter S. Thompson

• I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere... set out to find... this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?
  • No Direction Home (2005)

• I didn't go to classes. I just didn't feel like it.
  • No Direction Home (2005)

• An artist has gotta be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming.
  • No Direction Home (2005)

• You don't need my autograph. If you needed it, I'd give it to you.
  • No Direction Home (2005)

• You can't be wise and in love at the same time.
  • No Direction Home (2005)

• I had no answers to any of those questions any more than any other performer did, really. But, you know, that didn't stop the press or people or whoever they were from asking these questions. They, for some reason the press thought that performers had the answers to all these problems in the society and you know, like what can... What can you say to something like that? I mean, it's just kind of absurd.
  • No Direction Home (2005)

• I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.
  • On the influence of Jack Kerouac on him, as quoted Grasping for the Wind : The Search for Meaning in the 20th Century (2001) by John W. Whitehead

• Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.
  • On the influence of Jack Kerouac, as quoted in Jack Kerouac (2007) by Alison Behnke, p. 100

• I think it's the land. The streams, the forests, the vast emptiness. The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots. But I have a love for humankind, a love of truth, and a love of justice. I think I have a dualistic nature. I'm more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.
  • London Times interview (2009)

• It's not a character like in a book or a movie. He's not a bus driver. He doesn't drive a forklift. He's not a serial killer. It's me who's singing that, plain and simple. We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, “My character this, and my character that.” Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me.
  • Bob Dylan, interview with Bill Flanagan. telegraph.co.uk (13 April 2009).

• It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cellphones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets.
  • Rolling Stone #1078 (14 May 2009), p. 45

• The people in my songs are all me.
  • "Bob Dylan Sounds Off On The Origin Of His New Record, Parlor Music, Dr. Dre, And Who His Songs Are About", Huffington Post (20 May 2009)

• A man is successful if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night, and in between does what he likes.
  • Bob Dylan at Todomusica.org

• It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity.
  • p. 9

• I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don't think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.
  • p. 22

• Morality has nothing in common with politics.
  • p. 45

• What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening—all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.
  • p. 49

• Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn't yet.
  • p. 51

• America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes... My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch.
  • p. 73

• I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses.
  • p. 114

• I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.
  • p. 115

• I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I'm in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion.
  • p. 147

• Sometimes you say things in songs even if there's a small chance of them being true. And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say and sometimes you say things that everyone knows to be true. Then again, at the same time, you're thinking that the only truth on earth is that there is no truth on it. Whatever you are saying, you're saying in a ricky-tick way. There's never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did.
  • p. 220

• I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned — didn't know if I was stoned or straight... All these songs together, one after another made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted.
  • Referring to the first Woody Guthrie record he ever heard, p. 243

• [Ref Rimbaud line^[1] 'Je est un autre,]' “which translates into ‘I is someone else.’ When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier.”
  • p288

• The road out would be treacherous, and I didn’t know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges. Many got it wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either.
  • p. 293

Bob Dylan - Banquet Speech - Nobelprize.org

• 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 began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

• 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. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried.

• Like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?" So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

• You sound like a hillbilly; We want folk singers here.

• A lot of people don't have much food on their table
  But they got a lot of forks and knives
  And they gotta cut something

• I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
  Walkin' a road other men have gone down
  I'm seein' your world of people and things
  Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

• Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song,
  'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along
  Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn
  It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born

• Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Lead Belly too
  An' to all the good people that traveled with you
  Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
  That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
  • Compare: "We come with the dust and we go with the wind." Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty.

• How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
  How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?

• Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?

• How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn't see?

• How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?

• Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?

• The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

• So if you're travelin' in the north country fair,
  Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,
  Remember me to one who lives there.
  She once was a true love of mine.

• But I see through your eyes

• All the money you made will never buy back your soul.

• You ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins.

• There is one thing I know though I'm younger than you
  Even Jesus would not forgive what you do

• And I hope that you die
  And your death'll come soon
  I will follow your casket
  In the pale afternoon
  And I'll watch while you're lowered
  Down to your deathbed
  And I'll stand o'er your grave
  'Til I'm sure that you're dead

• Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
  And where have you been, my darling young one?
  • Compare: "O where ha' you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha' you been, my handsome young man?" Lord Randall, no. 12.

• I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it.

• I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken.

• I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.

• I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'.

• I met a white man who walked a black dog.

• And I'll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it.

• But I'll know my song well before I start singin'.

• It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

• It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
  If you don't know by now
  • Compare: "It ain't no use to sit and sigh now, darlin." Paul Clayton, Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone).

• I once loved a woman, a child I am told
  I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.

• I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
  Where I'm bound, I can't tell
  But goodbye's too good a word, babe
  So I'll just say fare thee well
  • Compare: "So I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road..." Paul Clayton, Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I'm Gone).

• I ain't saying you treated me unkind
  You could have done better but I don't mind
  You just kinda wasted my precious time
  But don't think twice, it's all right.

• I got into the driver's seat and drove down 42nd Street in my Cadillac.
  Good car to drive after a war.

• Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
  Some of the people can be all right part of the time,
  But all the people can't be all right all the time.
  I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
  I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.
  I said that.

Full lyrics online

• Come gather ’round people
  Wherever you roam
  And admit that the waters
  Around you have grown.
  And accept it that soon
  You’ll be drenched to the bone.
  If your time to you is worth savin’
  Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
  For the times they are a-changin'.

• Come writers and critics
  Who prophesize with your pen
  And keep your eyes wide
  The chance won't come again
  And don't speak too soon
  For the wheel's still in spin
  And there's no tellin' who that it's naming.’
  For the loser now will be later to win

• Come mothers and fathers
  Throughout the land
  And don't criticize
  What you can't understand
  Your sons and your daughters
  Are beyond your command
  Your old road is rapidly agin'.

• Come Congressmen, Senators, please heed the call
  Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
  For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled
  There’s a battle outside and it's ragin’.

• You prayed to the Lord above
  Oh please send you a friend
  Your empty pockets tell yuh
  That you ain't a-got no friend

• There's seven people dead
  On a South Dakota farm
  Somewhere in the distance
  There's seven new people born

• If there's anyone who knows, is there anyone who cares?

• You never ask questions When God's on your side

• You don't count the dead When God's on your side

• But I can't think for you
  You'll have to decide
  Whether Judas Iscariot
  Had God on his side

• The words fill my head, and fall to the floor, that if God's on our side, he'll stop the next war.

• Oh all the money that in my whole life I did spend
  Be it mine right or wrongfully
  I let it slip gladly past the hands of my friends
  To tie up the time most forcefully
  • Compare: "Of all the money e'er I had, I spent it in good company. And all the harm e'er I've done, Alas! it was to none but me." The Parting Glass.

• But if the arrow is straight
  And the point is slick
  It can pierce through dust no matter how thick

• Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
  And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
  I'd forsake them all for your sweet kiss
  For that's all I'm wishin' to be ownin'.

• Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way,
  I'm sure your mind is roamin'.
  I'm sure your heart is not with me,
  But with the country to where you're goin'.

• William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
  With a cane that he twirled around his Diamond ring finger
  At a Baltimore hotel society gath‘rin‘
  And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
  As they rode him in custody down to the station
  And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
  But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
  Take the rag away from your face
  Now ain‘t the time for your tears.

• William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
  Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
  With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
  And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
  Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
  And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
  In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
  But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
  Take the rag away from your face
  Now ain‘t the time for your tears.

• Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
  She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
  Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
  And never sat once at the head of the table
  And didn‘t even talk to the people at the table
  Who just cleande up all the food from the table
  And emptied the ashtrays in a whole other level
  Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
  That sailed through the air and came down through the room
  Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
  And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
  But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
  Take the rag away from your face
  Now ain‘t the time for your tears.

• In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gravel
  To show that all‘s equal and that the courts are on the level
  And the strings in the books ain‘t pulled and persuaded
  And that even the nobles get properly handled
  Once that the cops have chased after and caught ´em
  And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
  Stared at the person who killed for no reason
  Who just happened to be feelin‘ that way without warnin‘
  And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
  And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
  William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
  Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
  Bury the rag deep in your face
  For now‘s the time for your tears.

• All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you.

• I ain't looking for you to feel like me, see like me, or be like me.

• Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll,
  We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing.
  As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds,
  Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing.
  Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight,
  Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight,
  An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night,
  An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

• Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail,
  The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder,
  That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
  Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
  Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind,
  Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind,
  An' the poet and the painter far behind his rightful time
  An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

• It ain't no use a-talking to me
  It's just the same as talking to you

• I'm a poet, and I know it.

• Everything passes
  Everything changes
  Just do what you think you should do
  And someday maybe
  Who knows, baby
  I'll come and be cryin' to you

• Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

• Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
  "Rip down all hate," I screamed
  Lies that life is black and white
  Spoke from my skull.

• In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach
  Fearing not that I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach
  My existence led by confusion boats, mutiny from stern to bow.

• I had to say something to strike him very weird so I yelled out "I like Fidel Castro and his beard."

• All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight.
  I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight.
  My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night
  Leaving all of love's ashes behind me.
  

  The wind knocks my window, the room it is wet.
  The words to say I'm sorry, I haven't found yet.
  I think of her often and hope whoever she's met
  Will be fully aware of how precious she is.
  

  Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
  "How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
  And I answer them most mysteriously,
  "Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

• Go away from my window,
  Leave at your own chosen speed,
  I'm not the one you want, babe,
  I'm not the one you need.
  You say you're looking for someone,
  Who's never weak but always strong,
  To protect you and defend you,
  Whether you are right or wrong,
  Someone to open each and every door,
  But it ain't me, babe,
  No, no, no, it ain't me, babe,
  It ain't me you're looking for, babe.

Complete lyrics here

• Johnny's in the basement
  Mixing up the medicine
  I'm on the pavement
  Thinking about the government
  The man in the trenchcoat
  Badge out, laid off
  Says he's got a bad cough
  Wants to get it paid off
  Look out kid
  It's somethin' you did
  God knows when
  But you're doin' it again

• You don't need a weather man
  To know which way the wind blows

• Get jailed, jump bail
  Join the army, if you fail

• Don't follow leaders
  Watch the parkin' meters

• Twenty years of schoolin'
  And they put you on the day shift

• The pump don't work
  'Cause the vandals took the handles

• She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back.

• She could take the dark out the nighttime and paint the daytime black.

• You will start out standing, proud to steal her anything she sees, but you will wind up peeking through her keyhole down upon your knees.

• Well, I try my best
  To be just like I am
  But everybody wants you
  To be just like them

• I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

• There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.

• She knows too much to argue or to judge.

• In the dime stores and bus stations,
  People talk of situations,
  Read books repeat quotations,
  Draw conclusions on the wall.

• Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth.

• I said, "You know they refused Jesus, too"
  He said, "You're not Him"

• The ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.

• And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme...

• It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run

• Take me disappearing, through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time...

• Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.

• With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.

• Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.
  I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
  Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.
  In the jingle-jangle morning, I'll come following you.

• All and all can only fall with a crushing but meaningless blow.

• And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

• Of war and peace the truth just twist, its curfew gull it glides.

• 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

• He not busy being born is busy dying

• Others say, don't hate nothing at all except hatred

• Disillusioned words like bullets bark
  As human gods aim for their mark
  Make everything from toy guns that spark
  To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
  It's easy to see without looking too far
  That not much is really sacred

• Even the President of the United States
  Sometimes must have to stand naked

• It is not he or she or them or it
  That you belong to.

• While one who sings with his tongue on fire
  Gargles in the rat race choir

• Money doesn't talk, it swears

• You must leave, now take what you need, You think will last
  But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
  Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
  Crying like a fire in the sun.
• The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense.
• Your lover who just walked out the door, has taken all his blankets from your floor.
• Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
  Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you.
  Strike another match, go! Start anew
  And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

• You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend. When I was down, you just stood there grinning.

• Do you take me for such a fool to think I'd make contact with one that tries to hide what he don't know to begin with.

• I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes. You'd know what a drag it is to see you.

• How does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?

• Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you.
  People call, say beware doll, you're bound to fall, you thought they were all, kiddin you.

• You used to laugh about
  Everybody that was hangin' out
  Now you don't talk so loud
  Now you don't seem so proud
  About having to be scrounging for your next meal

• You never turned around to see the frowns, on the jugglers and the clowns when they all did, tricks for you.

• Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, they're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made

• Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse.
  When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
  You're invisible now. You've got no secrets to conceal.

• The sweet pretty things are in bed now, of course.

• The sun's not yellow, it's chicken.

• Stop all this weeping, swallow your pride, you will not die, it's not poison

• The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone
  Causes Galileo's math book to get thrown
  At Delilah's who sitting worthlessly alone
  But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter

• And the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul
  To the old folks home and the college

• Well I ride on a mail train baby, can't buy a thrill.
• Don't the moon look good, mama, shinin' through the trees?
  Don't the brakeman look good, mama, flaggin' down the double E?
  Don't the sun look good goin' down over the sea?

• And you say, Oh my God, am I here all alone?

• You've been with the professors and they've all liked your looks. With great lawyers you've discussed lepers and crooks.

• You go watch the geek, who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak, and says, how does it feel to be such a freak?, and you say, impossible as he hands you a bone.

• And something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?

• Here's your throat back, thanks for the loan.

• You put your eyes in your pockets and your nose on the ground.

• They already expect you to just give a check to tax-deductible charity organization.

• Oh God said to Abraham, Kill me a son.
  Abe says, Man, you must be puttin' me on.
  God say, No. Abe say, What?
  God say, You can do what you want Abe, but
  the next time you see me comin' you better run.
  Well Abe says, Where do you want this killin' done?
  God says, Out on Highway 61.

• The cops don't need you, and, man, they expect the same.
• I started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff.

• They're selling postcards of the hanging

• Yes, I received your letter yesterday
  (About the time the door knob broke)
  When you asked how I was doing
  Was that some kind of joke?
  All these people that you mention
  Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
  I had to rearrange their faces
  And give them all another name
  Right now I can't read too good
  Don't send me no more letters no
  Not unless you mail them
  From Desolation Row
  

• Now at midnight all the agents
  And the superhuman crew
  Come out and round up everyone
  That knows more than they do

• The Titanic sails at dawn

• And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
  Fighting in the captain's tower
  While calypso singers laugh at them
  And fishermen hold flowers...

• Ron Rosenbaum: When you hear your songs in your mind, it's not just you strumming alone, you mean?

• Dylan: Well, no, it is to begin with. But then I always hear other instruments, how they should sound. The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That's my particular sound. I haven't been able to succeed in getting it all the time. Mostly, I've been driving at a combination of guitar, harmonica and organ, but now I find myself going into territory that has more percussion in it and [pause] rhythms of the soul.

• interview, Playboy, March 1978

• But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned!

• Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident.

• Oh Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?

• And here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.

• The one was Texas medicine, the other was just a railroad gin. And, like a fool, I mixed them; and it strangled up my mind.

• Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.

• You see, you're just like me. I hope you're satisfied.

• Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet?

• We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it.

• He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all

• Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.
  Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
  But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues
  You can tell by the way she smiles

• The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.

• Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him.

• But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.

• She is good to me
  And there's nothing she doesn't see
  She knows where I'd like to be
  But it doesn't matter
  

• Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
  Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
  Well, you must tell me, baby
  How your head feels under somethin' like that
  Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
  • Compare: "I saw you riding 'round in your brand new automobile/ Yes I saw you ridin' around, babe, in your brand new automobile/ Yes you was sitting there happy with your handsome driver at the wheel/ In your brand new automobile." Lightnin' Hopkins, Automobile Blues.
• I asked the doctor if I could see you
  It's bad for your health, he said
  Well, I disobeyed his orders, I came to see you but I found him there instead
  Well, I don't mind him cheating on me but I sure wish he'd take that off his head
  Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

• She takes just like a woman, yes she does
  She makes love just like a woman, yes she does
  And she aches just like a woman
  But she breaks just like a little girl.

• You say you love me and you're thinking of me, but you know you might be wrong.

• But to live outside the law, you must be honest.
• And now here I stand, looking at your yellow railroad, in the ruins of your balcony

• Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
  Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
  My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
  Should I leave them by your gate,
  Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

• With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace,
  And your deck of cards missing the jack and the ace,
  And your basement clothes and your hollow face,
  Who among them can think he could outguess you?

• "There must be some way out of here," said the Joker to the Thief
  
• All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
  While all the women came and went, barefoot servants too
  Outside in the distance, a wild cat did growl
  Two riders were approaching. The wind began to howl.

• I put my fingers against the glass, and bowed my head and cried

• "Nothing is revealed"

• Lay, lady, lay. Lay across my big, brass bed.

• Whatever colors you have in your mind, I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine.

• His clothes are dirty, but his hands are clean, and you're the best thing that he's ever seen.

• Throw my ticket out the window,
  Throw my suitcase out there too,
  Throw my troubles out the door, I don't need them anymore,
  'Cause tonight I'll be staying here with you.

• Ev'rybody's in despair,
  Ev'ry girl and boy
  But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
  Ev'rybody's gonna jump for joy.

• Come all without, come all within,
  You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.

• Time passes slowly up here in the mountains

• Some day everything is gonna be different, when I paint my masterpiece.

• May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May your song always be sung, May you stay forever young.
• May your hands always be busy. May your feet always be swift. May you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift. May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung. May you stay forever young.

• Early one mornin' the sun was shinin',
  I was layin' in bed
  Wond'rin'if she'd changed at all
  If her hair was still red.

• Tangled up in blue...

• Lord knows I've paid some dues gettin' through...

• I helped her out of a jam, I guess, but I used a little too much force...

• And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin' coal. Pourin' off of every page, like it was written in my soul from me to you...

• The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew...

• All the people we used to know, they're an illusion to me now...

• Don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they do with their lives...

• We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point of view...

• But all the while I was alone
  The past was close behind,
  I seen a lot of women
  But she never escaped my mind,
  

• I lived with them on Montague Street
  In a basement down the stairs
  There was music in the cafes at night
  And revolution in the air.

• You're an idiot, babe. It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

• I can't help it if I'm lucky.

• Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin' me see stars.

• I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned slowly into autumn.

• Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats, blowing through the letters that we wrote.
  Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves,
  We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.

• It was gravity which pulled us in and destiny which broke us apart

• You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn't enough to change my heart

• Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstacy,
  I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory and all your ragin' glory

• You'll never know the hurt I suffer, nor the pain I rise above, and I'll never know the same about you...

• I kiss good-bye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.

• I'm going out of my mind, oh, oh; with a pain that stops and starts; like a corkscrew to my heart; Ever since we've been apart

• A change in the weather is known to be extreme; but what's the sense in changing horses in mid-stream?

• Time is a jetplane — it moves too fast. Oh but what a shame that all we've shared can't last...

• Love is so simple, to quote a phrase; you've known it all the time, I'm learnin' it these days.

• I know where I can find you — in somebody's room. It's the price I have to pay, you're a big girl all the way.

• Backstage the girls were playin' five-card stud by the stairs,
  Lily had two queens, she was hopin' for a third to match her pair.
  Outside the streets were fillin' up, the window was open wide,
  A gentle breeze was blowin', you could feel it from inside.
  Lily called another bet and drew up the Jack of Hearts.

• Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine.

• Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm...

• "Come in", she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm."

• I always have respected her for doin' what she did and gettin' free

• Say for me that I'm all right though things get kind of slow
  She might think that I've forgotten her don't tell her it isn't so.

• Sundown yellow moon I replay the past
  I know every scene by heart they all went by so fast

• If she's passing back this way I'm not that hard to find
  Tell her she can look me up if she's got the time.

• Well, it's sugar for sugar
  And salt for salt
  If you go down in the flood
  It's gonna be your own fault
  • Compare: "I give you sugar for sugar, but all you want is salt for salt/ Well if you can't get along with me, then it's your own fault." Richard Brown, James Alley Blues.

• Take care of all your memories. said my friend Mick, For you cannot relive them.

• If your mem'ry serves you well, we were gonna meet again and wait, so I think I'll just unpack my bags and sit before it gets too late.
  No man alive will come to you with another tale to tell, but you know that we shall meet again, if your mem'ry serves you well.

• If your memory serves you well, I was gonna confiscate your lace and wrap it up in a sailor's knot and hide it in your case.
  And if I knew for sure that it was yours, it was oh so hard to tell, and you know that we shall meet again, if your memory serves you well.

• If your memory serves you well, I remember you're the one who called out me to call out them to get your business done.
  And after every plan has failed, and there was nothing left to tell, well you knew that we shall meet again if your memory serves you well.

• Wheels on fire, rolling down the road, best notify my next of kin, this wheel shall explode!

• Here comes the story of The Hurricane, the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.
  Put in a prison cell, but one time he coulda been the champion of the world.

• Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land, where justice is a game.

• There's lots of pretty girls in Mozambique.

• Don't turn away, you'll create sorrow,
  Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore,
  You may not see me tomorrow.

• Gentlemen, he said I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes
  I've moved your mountains and marked your cards
  But Eden is burning either get ready for elimination
  Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards
  
  Peace will come with tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire
  But will offer no reward when her false idols fall
  And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
  Between the King and the Queen of Swords

• Señor, señor, can you tell me where we’re heading? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?

• Do you love me, or are you just extending good will?
• I have dined with kings, I've been offered wings, and I've never been too impressed

• It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.

• You may call me Bobby; you may call me Zimmy...

• Now there's spiritual warfare, flesh and blood breaking down. You either got faith or you got unbelief, and there ain't no neutral ground.

• The enemy is subtle. How be it we're deceived? When the truth's in our hearts and we still don't believe.

• My so-called friends have fallen under a spell: they look me squarely in the eye and say, "Well; all is well."

• We are covered in blood, girl. You know both our forefathers were slaves. Let us hope they've found mercy in their bone-filled graves.

• They'd like to drive me from this town; they don't want me around, 'cause I believe in you.

• I believe in you even on the morning after.

• Have they counted the cost it'll take to bring down all the earthly principles they're gonna have to abandon?

• All that foreign oil controlling American soil. Look around you, it's just bound to make you embarrassed: sheiks walking around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings, deciding America's future from Amsterdam and to Paris.

• In the home of the brave, Jefferson turning over in his grave.

• Man's ego's inflated, his laws are outdated. They don't apply no more. You can't rely no more to be standing around waiting.

• Fools glorify themselves, trying to manipulate Satan.

• The enemy I see wears a cloak of decency.

• People starving and thirsting; grain elevators are bursting. You know, it costs more to store the food than it do to give it.

• They talk about a life of brotherly love? Show me someone who knows how to live it.

• It sure do bother me to see my loved ones turning into puppets.

• (Alternate version.) A brave man will kill you with a sword, a coward with a kiss.

• Don't wanna judge nobody — don't wanna be judged.

• You got some big dreams, baby, but in order to dream you gotta still be asleep.

• Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts; Karl Marx has got you by the throat, and Henry Kissinger's got you tied up into knots.

• You got innocent men in jail, your insane asylums are filled.

• Do you ever wonder just what God requires? You think he's just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.

• They tell you "Time is money," as if your life was worth its weight in gold.

• When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

• Truth is an arrow, and the gate is narrow that it passes through.

• In the fury of the moment I can see the Master's hand
  In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

• I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
  Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
  • Variant: "I am hanging in the balance of a perfect, finished plan" (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3)

• Freedom just around the corner for you, but with truth so far off, what good will it do?

• Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, both of their futures so full of dread.

• Shedding off one more layer of skin, keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

• You go to Sodom and Gomorrah, but what do you care? Ain't nobody there would want to marry your sister.

• You look into the fiery furnace, see the rich man without any name.

• The book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers.

• The rifleman's stalking the sick and the lame; preacherman seeks the same. Who'll get there first is uncertain.

• A woman just gave birth to a prince today and dressed him in scarlet. He'll put the priest in his pocket, put the blade to the heat, take the motherless children off the street and place them at the feet of a harlot.

• A woman like you should be at home. That's where you belong, taking care of somebody nice who don't know how to do you wrong.

• Just how much abuse will you be able to take? Well, there's no way to tell by the first kiss.

• They say in your father's house there's many mansions; each one of 'em got a fireproof floor.

• They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.

• Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king.

• There's only one step down from here, baby. It's called the Land of Permanent Bliss.

• Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.

• Nobody sees through him — no, not even the chief of police.

• He could be standing next to you, the person that you notice least.

• He's following a star, the same one that the three men followed east.

• Some one else is speaking with my mouth, but I'm listening only to my heart.

• Took a stranger to teach me to look into justice's beautiful face, and to see an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

• A lot of people complaining that there is no work. I say, "Why you say that for?" When nothin' you got is US-made — they don't make nothin' here no more.

• Capitalism is above the law; it's said it don't count 'less it sells.

• It's sundown on the union that was made in the USA. Sure was a good idea till greed got in the way.

• Democracy don't rule the world; you'd better get that in your head. This world is ruled by violence.

• Yesterday's just a memory; tomorrow's never what it's supposed to be.

• Man thinks 'cause he rules the earth, he can do with it as he please. And if things don't change soon, he will.

• For man has invented his doom; first step was touching the moon.

• Man is opposed to fair play: he wants it all, and he wants it his way.

• What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big.

• I live in another world, where life and death are memorized.
• I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise, whom Nature's beast fears as they come.
• Time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies.
• All I see are dark eyes.

• If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself.

• I've been deceived by the clown inside of me. I thought that he was righteous but he's vain.

• My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost. He's always off somewhere when I need him most.

• Let me feel your love one more time before I abandon it.

• I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity.

• If I thought about it, I never would have done it, I guess I would have let it slide.

• The old Rounder in the iron mask slipped me the master key, somebody had to unlock your heart, he said it was up to me.

• It frightens me the awful truth of how sweet life can be.

• When you bite off more than you can chew, you pay the penalty, somebody's got to tell the tale, I guess it must be up to me.

• Somebody's got to cry some tears, I guess it must be up to me.

• Forgive me, baby, for what I didn't do.

• [Recounting a scene in The Gunfighter] Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square — I want him to feel what it's like to every moment face his death.

• I can't believe we've lived so long and are still so far apart.

• I know she ain't you, but she's here, and she's got that dark rhythm in her soul.

• She said, "Welcome to the land of the living dead," but you could tell she was so brokenhearted — she said, "Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt."

• We're going all the way, till the wheels fall off and burn, till the sun peels the paint and the seat covers fade and the water moccasins die.

• I didn't know whether to duck or to run, so I ran.

• When I saw you break down in front of the judge and cry real tears, it was the best damn thing I saw anybody do.

• I've always been the kind of person who doesn't like to trespass, but sometimes you just find yourself over the line.

• I feel pretty good, but that ain't saying much — I could feel a whole lot better, if you were just here by my side to show me how.

• The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was that his name wasn't Henry Porter.

• Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content.

• You always said people don't do what they believe in; they just do what's most convenient, then they repent.

• Tweeter and the Monkey Man were hard up for cash
  They stayed up all night selling cocaine and hash
  To an undercover cop who had a sister named Jan
  Who for reasons unexplained she loved the Monkey Man

• Jan had told him many times "it was you to me who taught:
  in Jersey anything's legal as long as you don't get caught"

• We live in a political world
  Where peace is not welcome at all
  It's turned away from the door to wander some more
  Or put up against the wall.

• Ring them bells Sweet Martha
  For the poor man's son
  Ring them bells so the world will know
  That God is one
  Oh, the shepherd is asleep
  Where the willows weep
  And the mountains are filled with lost sheep.

• There are no mistakes in life, some people say
  And it's true, sometimes you can see it that way
  People don't live or die, people just float
  She went with the man in the long black coat.
• There’s smoke on the water, it’s been there since June
  Tree trunks uprooted, 'neath the high crescent moon
  Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force
  Somebody is out there beating on a dead horse

• Seen a shooting star tonight, and I thought of you.

• They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down.

• Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free. Don't let an egg get laid in it by something you can't see.

• Let me die in my footsteps before I go under the ground.

• I'd throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea, for they are mistakes of a past history.

• The whole world's a bottle, And life's but a dram, When the bottle gets empty, It sure ain't worth a damn.

• When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

• Well, God is in His heaven
  And we all want what's his
  But power and greed and corruptible seed
  Seem to be all that there is
  I'm gazing out the window
  Of the St. James Hotel
  And I know no one can sing the blues
  Like Blind Willie McTell

• Drinkin' man listens to the voice he hears,
  In a crowded room full of covered up mirrors,
  Lookin' into the lost forgotten years
  For dignity

• I'm sick of love, and I'm in the thick of it.

• Last night I danced with a stranger, but she just reminded me you were the one.

• Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain

• I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still
  Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb
  I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from.

• I been down on the bottom of a whirlpool of lies

• Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

• I could hold you for a million years

• When you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.

• She says, you don’t read women authors do you?... I said, You’re way wrong. She says, Which ones have you read then? I say, I read Erica Jong!
• Insanity is crashing up against my soul.

• Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet... Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street.

• People are crazy and times are strange
  I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range,
  I used to care, but things have changed.

• You can hurt someone and not even know it

• I been walkin forty miles of bad road. If the Bible is right the world will explode. I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can

• My clothes are wet, tight on my skin. Not as tight as the corner that I've painted myself in.

• You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.

• I'm walking through the leaves falling from the trees,
  Feelin' like a stranger nobody sees.

• So many things that we never will undo
  I know you're sorry, I'm sorry too.

• I'm drownin' in the poison, got not future got no past.

• But my heart is not weary; it's light and it's free
  I've got nothing but affection for those who've sailed with me.

• Everybody movin', if they ain't already there. Everyboy got to move somewhere.

• Things should start to get interesting right about now.

• Politician's got on his jogging shoes, he must be running for office, got no time to lose

• I'm sittin' on my watch so I can be on time.

• The future for me is already a thing of the past.

• I'm gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more.

• Funny how the things you have the hardest time parting with are the things you need the least.
• I'm gonna spare the defeated—I'm gonna speak to the crowd
  I'm gonna spare the defeated, boys, I'm going to speak to the crowd
  I am goin' to teach peace to the conquered
  I'm gonna tame the proud
  • Compare: "But yours will be the rulership of nations, / remember Roman, these will be your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud." The Aeneid of Virgil: A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum, 6.1134–1137.

• Down over the window
  Comes the dazzling sunlit rays
  Through the back alleys, through the blinds
  Another one of them endless days
• My old man he's like some feudal lord, got more lives than a cat.

• Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard.
• I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind.
• As great as you are, man, you’ll never be greater than yourself.
• Don’t reach out for me, she said. Can’t you see I’m drowning too?

• Last night across the alley there was a pounding on the wall
  It must have been Don Pascuale making a two a.m. booty call

• Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need.

• Feel like my soul is beginning to expand. Look into my heart and you will sort of understand.

• The world of research has gone berserk. Too much paperwork.

• Some people never work a day in their lives, don't know what work even means.

• If I catch my opponents ever sleepin', I'll just slaughter 'em where they lie.

• I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver
  And I'm reading James Joyce
  Some people they tell me
  I've got the blood of the land in my voice

• The door has closed for evermore,
  If indeed there ever was a door.

• Just give to me my gravestone
  With it clearly carved upon:
  "I'm a long time a-comin'
  An' I'll be a long time gone"

• She left one too many a boy behind
  He committed suicide

• It's soon after midnight, and I got a date with a fairy queen

• Another politician pumpin' out the piss.

• He bent in the middle like a twisted pin

• Long before the First Crusade, way back before England or America was made.
• Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his ax.

• Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
  Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King

• I lit the torch, I looked to the east, and I crossed the Rubicon.

• I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see.
• Well, it might not be the thing to do, but I’m sticking with you through and through.

• The Nobel Prize for Literature is yet another step towards immortality for Bob Dylan. The rebellious, reclusive, unpredictable artist/composer is exactly where the Nobel Prize for Literature needs to be. His gift with words is unsurpassable. Out of my repertoire spanning 60 years, no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty and humour than Bob's. None has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again.
  • Joan Baez, as quoted in "Bob Dylan: Nobel Prize is a step towards immortality, says Joan Baez", BBC.com (14 October 2016)

• A voice like sand and glue.
  • David Bowie, "Song for Bob Dylan" (1971)

• I relied on Bob Dylan as a seer who literally channeled the mood of the revolution. His John Wesley Harding album, named for a famous outlaw, had thrilled me the year before, especially "All Along the Watchtower," which seemed to me a coda for revolution. Some of the women in our group and many in the new women's movement had turned against Dylan and other artists for their misogyny, and I couldn't deny its presence in many lyrics.
  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Outlaw Woman (2001)

• Dylan is to me the perfect symbol of the anti-artist in our society. He is against everything—the last resort of someone who doesn't really want to change the world. ... I think his poetry is punk. It's derivative and terribly old hat. ... Dylan songs accept the world as it is.
  • Ewan MacColl, interview with Karl Dallas, "Focus on MacColl", Melody Maker (18 September 1965), p. 23. Quoted in No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (1986) by Robert Shelton, p. 296.

• Bob Dylan took a lot of air out of the room when it came to songwriters. Everybody had a tough row to hoe distinguishing themselves once Bob invented our job.
  • Steve Earle, quoted at "Homage to Townes" at Austin360.com (18 May 2009)

• I saw Bob Dylan a couple of weeks ago (this being, what, December 1994?) and he was saying… “Who owns all the money? Who owns the media?”. As he travels around the world, he notices that all the media change their story every week, and someone is directing that. And “Who owns all the money?”, he was saying. And it was like he knew that he had a great deal of power, to influence people’s psyches, or minds, or thinking, or psychology, or opinion-ation, and yet his power was miniscule, compared to the power of the moguls of the media. And in America it’s only 22 people who run… who own… 80 percent of the mass-media, so that the… it would be very difficult for a poem… for a poet… to overcome that barrage of bullshit.
  On the other hand, poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks (like a politician or someone preparing an editorial in a dignified newspaper). So if you need the historical truth of what people think inside, you have to follow Shelley (and his admonition is that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the race”) — or what William Carlos Williams said more acutely was, “The government is of words”.
  After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years. And so, in the long run, it may have an ameliorating effect on the spirit.
  • Allen Ginsberg, Face to Face, BBC, 1994.

• What I wanted to do with Bobby was just to get him to sound in the studio as natural, just as he was in person, and have that extraordinary personality come thru. ... After all, he's not a great harmonica player, and he's not a great guitar player, and he's not a great singer. He just happens to be an original. And I just wanted to have that originality come thru.
  • John Hammond (Dylan's first producer), Pop Chronicles, [Show 31 - Ballad in Plain D: An introduction to the Bob Dylan era. Part 1, interview recorded 10.4.1968.

• The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he's no longer where he was. He's like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you'll surely get burned. Dylan's life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. And that's why his fan base is so obsessive, so desirous of finding the truth and the absolutes and the answers to him — things that Dylan will never provide and will only frustrate. ... Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.
  • Todd Haynes, about his choice of 6 people to portray Dylan in his film I'm Not There, in "Footnote fetishism & "I'm Not There" by Jim Emerson" at The Sun-Times (9 October 2007)

• Slight, wiry, his blond, curly hair worn long, Bob Dylan never wears a tie and never lets anyone else make decisions for him. His unshakable independence courses through his songs—some of them wryly irreverent, others harshly critical of what he regards as hypocrisy and cruelty. His voice is acrid but curiously compelling, and he has become the most influential folksinger among today's teenagers—as well as among older dissenters. [...] Now 24, he is less the angry preacher of causes than he was two years ago. His songs have become more warmly personal and more deftly witty. He is cactus on the outside and romantic revolutionary within. He has no ideology except that of inner freedom. He is his own man.
  • Nat Hentoff, "Cosmo Listens to Records", Cosmopolitan (November 1965)

• He had a lovely voice, but he was also, I think, a great poet. And he was the background music to a lot of people of my age. I don't take a lot of stock in generational thought, as you know. I think generational solidarity is the lowest form of solidarity there is. But I think that for every decade or so, every generational set, there is a special voice. And certainly for my lot, it was him.
  • Christopher Hitchens, interview on The Hugh Hewitt Show (13 July 2010)

• My hero was and still is Bob Dylan.
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, in Profile: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian (19 February 2005)

• I defy you to say what he'll be doing six months from now. He's just driven by pure art. You know, his son said to me..."There is no doubt that if my dad had never made it, if he was sitting on the side of the sidewalk with his guitar and a hat out in front of him, he would be doing precisely doing the same songs. His whole career would be exactly the same." Now, there is certainly hyperbole in that, but it's kind of, sort of true... If we have anybody who's Shakespeare in our time, it's Dylan, and he just speaks to me more and more, and he once said in an interview that the purpose of art was to inspire, and when you see a Dylan show...You would think he's so good, you know—if you go see a jazz cat who's so good playing bass, you can leave that show going, "Why even pick up a bass again?" But for some reason—and I'm not the only one that feels this—at the end of the Dylan show, art just seems so good. I want to go write a play, or write a novel. I'll stay up all night and write a song. And you don't care that it's not as good. The other thing that I love about Dylan is he is a freak, not a cheerleader... Dylan just stands there and says, "I am speaking for me. Maybe some of this is true for you to. I don't know. But I'm digging so deep." All of his mining, you know, is going towards his heart and deeper into his brain. He makes no attempt, that I can tell, to say, "Oh yeah, this is gonna kill 'em. This is what they'll like." And that's where universality has to live. You can't be universal if you're trying to please other people. You can only be universal if you have so clearly who you are, and Dylan has no idea who he is, but he's still searching and he's sharing that process with us.
  • Penn Jillette, ReasonTV interview (2 August 2016)

• The conversation was flat. Suddenly, however, Dylan leapt to his feet and started berating me. He said, for example, something like, 'You'll never understand it; it happens so fast it'll go right past you,' and more of the same. I was startled, yes, but kept on trying to ask sensible, interesting questions; the attack persisted. I shrugged and left. The whole episode was entirely unprovoked... That evening, I went to the concert. My opinion then and now was that the music was unpleasant, the lyrics inflated, and Dylan a self-indulgent whining show-off.
  • Horace Freeland Judson, as quoted in Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan (2011) by Howard Sounes, p. 179

• Musically, Dylan's not very gifted; he's borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He's got a lot of borrowed things. He's not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs ... it's a mask of sorts.
  • Joni Mitchell, Interview with CBC (2013), as quoted in "Why Joni Mitchell once labelled Bob Dylan 'a plagiarist'" by Joe Taysom, Far Out Magazine (4 June 2021)

• He's one of the great artists of the century.
  • Andrew Motion, as quoted in "Laureate gives laurels to Dylan", The Guardian (3 October 1999)

• I can still picture Bob Dylan, with just a bassist, a piano player, and his guitar, tenderly reworking "The Times They Are a-Changin'." When finished, he stepped off the stage, shook my hand, gave a little grin and bow in front of me and Michelle, and vanished without a word.
  • Barack Obama A Promised Land (2020)

• "The stage is the only place where I'm happy." But this has its own sadnesses, like so much love. He is the one person who has to be at a Dylan concert and the one person who can't go to a Dylan concert.
  • Christopher Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin (2003), concluding words, p. 490

• A day doesn't go by when I don't listen to Dylan or at least think about him and his art. I just think we're terrifically lucky to be alive at a time when he is.
  • Christopher Ricks, as quoted in "Dylan, Master Poet? Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" by Charles McGrath, The New York Times (9 June 2004)

• Five years ago [Dylan] played a concert here at the university and I had no hand in arranging it; I was told about it rather late and could have killed the organizers. Shortly before the concert I received word to come backstage, so my wife and I went half an hour before the show. And Dylan said: "Mr Ricks, we meet at last." My reply was: "Have you read any good books lately?" [...] and he said: "Richard III". [...] Dylan wasn't at all surprised by my question and he really did want to talk about Richard III.
  • Christopher Ricks, interview with Ieva Lesinska: "A lesson in Dylan appreciation", Eurozine (11 April 2008)

• Dylan creates a mythic atmosphere out of the land around us. The land we walk on every day and never see until someone shows it to us.
  • Sam Shepard, The Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977), p. 63

• Dylan has invented himself. He's made himself up from scratch. That is, from the things he had around him and inside him. Dylan is an invention of his own mind. The point isn't to figure him out but to take him in. He gets into you anyway, so why not just take him in? He's not the first one to have invented himself, but he's the first one to have invented Dylan...
  • Sam Shepard, The Rolling Thunder Logbook (1977), p. 100

• Dylan was a revolutionary. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. ... To this day, wherever great rock music is being made, there is the shadow of Bob Dylan.
  • Bruce Springsteen, speech for Dylan's inauguration into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (20 January 1988), quoted in Dylan: behind the shades (1991) by Clinton Heylin, p. 422

• Dylan's heart rests in his vocation. He is a white bluesman par excellence. His voice is born out of that vocation, informed by a vision rooted in reaching and teaching as many people as possible.
  • Cornel West Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (2009)

• Dylan is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next. But hopefully he will remain a mediator, using the language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators.
  • Ellen Willis, in "Dylan" in Representative Men : Cult Heroes of Our Time (1970) edited by Theodore L. Gross

• I'll never be Bob Dylan. He's the master. If I'd like to be anyone, it's him. And he's a great writer, true to his music and done what he feels is the right thing to do for years and years and years. He's great. He's the one I look to. I'm always interested in what he's doing now, or did last, or did a long time ago that I didn't find out about. The guy has written some of the greatest poetry and put it to music in a way that it touched me, and other people have done that, but not so consistently or as intensely. Like me, he waits around and keeps going, and he knows that he doesn't have the muse all the time, but he knows that it'll come back and it'll visit him and he'll have his moment.
  • Neil Young, "The Resurrection of Neil Young", Time magazine interview (28 September 2005)

• There was a new popular music of protest. Pete Seeger had been singing protest songs since the forties, but now he came into his own, his audiences much larger. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, singing not only protest songs, but songs reflecting the new abandon, the new culture, became popular idols. A middle-aged woman on the West Coast, Malvina Reynolds, wrote and sang songs that fit her socialist thinking and her libertarian spirit, as well as her critique of the modern commercial culture.
  • Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

• Bob Dylan Jokeson Expecting Rain
• Bob Dylan Lyrics
• Quotes about Bob Dylan
• Searchable database of Bob's written word
• Film dialogue in the lyrics of Bob Dylan.