Bob Dylan in 85 Quotations

Somehow Bob Dylan is a man of both few and many words.

Much of what Dylan has publicly said over the years had been documented by journalists and fans, and in honor of his 85th birthday, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to scour the internet, books, recordings and many other sources to make a list of 85 quotations.

Listed in no particular order, these have been culled from various interviews, press conferences, films, and just about everything else over many decades of Dylan’s career. Some are downright funny, while others show more of his sensitive side.

1. “All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”
From: Los Angeles Free Press, 1965

2. “Life itself is improvised. We don’t live life as a scripted thing. Two boxers go into the ring and they improvise. You go make love with someone and you improvise. Go to sports car races, total improvisation.”
From: An Interview With Allen Ginsberg, 1977

3. “Some people – you’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.”
From: 60 Minutes, 2004

4. “You just have to keep going to find that thing that lets you in the door, if you actually want to get in the door. Sometimes in life when that day comes and you’re given the key, you throw it away. You find that whatever you were looking for your entire life isn’t where you thought it was. Folk music came at exactly the right time in my life. It wouldn’t have happened 10 years later, and 10 years earlier I wouldn’t have known what kind of songs those were.”
From: AARP, 2015

5. “I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. 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.”
From: Newsweek, 1997

6. “I was with the carnival off and on…I was clean-up boy. I was mainliner on the Ferris wheel. Do the shoreline things. Used to do all kinds of stuff like that.”
From: WBAI New York, 1962

7. “I’m one of these people that think everybody has certain gifts, you know, when they’re born, and you got enough trouble just trying to find out what it is. I used to play the guitar when I was 10, you know. So I figured maybe my thing is playing the guitar, maybe that’s my little gift. Like somebody can make a cake, or somebody else can saw a tree down, and other people write. Nobody’s really got the right to say any one of these gifts are better than any other body’s. That’s just the way they’re distributed out.”
From: WFMT, Chicago, 1963

8. “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?”
From: Rolling Stone, 1978

9. “I love Mick Jagger. I mean, I go back a long ways with him, and I always wish him the best. But to see him jumping around like he does — I don’t give a sh– in what age, from Altamont to RFK Stadium — you don’t have to do that, man.”
From: Rolling Stone, 1987

10. “I mean, anybody that expects anything from me is just a borderline case. Nobody with any kind of reality is going to expect anything from me.”
From: Westwood One Radio, 1984

READ MORE: 20 Different Takes on Bob Dylan’s Most-Covered Song

11. “Well, it seems to me that waitresses are getting younger and younger these days. Some of them look like babies.”
From: Esquire, 1987

12. “I’m not interested in myself as a performer. Performers are people who perform for other people. Unlike actors, I know what I’m saying. It’s very simple in my mind. It doesn’t matter what kind of audience reaction this whole thing gets. What happens on stage is straight. It doesn’t expect any rewards or fines from any kind of outside agitators. It’s ultra-simple, and would exist whether anybody was looking or not.”
From: Playboy, 1966

13. “I don’t play guitar if I don’t feel like playing. I’d rather get drunk.”
From: Izzy Young’s Notebook, 1962

14. “When I get to thinking, I’m usually in some kind of trouble.”
From: KNX-FM, Los Angeles (1975)

15. “The evolution of song is like a snake with its tail in its mouth. That’s evolution. That’s what it is. As soon as you’re there, you find your tail.”
From: SongTalk, 1991

16. “A person’s body chemistry changes every seven years. No one on earth is the same now as they were seven years ago, or will be seven years from now. I could become you! It’s all intended growth. It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to know that if you don’t grow you die. You have to burst outm you have to find the sunlight.”
From: TV Guide, 1976

17. “There’s a lot of clever people around who write songs. My songs, what makes them different is that there’s a foundation to them. That’s why they’re still around, that’s why my songs are still being performed. It’s not because they’re such greta songs. They don’t fall into the commercial category. They’re not written to be performed by other people. But they’re standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that’s what people are hearing.”
From: The New York Times, 1997

18. “No, I’m not livin’ in a monastery. I’m out and about in the world, I just come in contact with where people are and what their feelings are and from that I create the artistic experience — plus my own feelings and instinct I have myself, I use that. But sometimes it seems like there isn’t enough time to go and be where you wanna be.”
From: Minnesota Daily, 1978

19. “At every point in my life I’ve had to make decisions for what I believed in. Sometimes I’ve ended up hurting people that I’ve loved. Other times I’ve ended up loving people I never thought I would.”
From: The Dominion, 1980

20. “Hmm, you ever heard of a group called Fishbone? I thought they’re pretty good.”
From: Rockline, KLOS-FM, Los Angeles (1985)

Listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’

21. “I’m lucky to have any audience. A lot of my contemporaries really don’t have any.”
From: The Age (1992)

22. “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.”
From: Rolling Stone, 2007

23. “Modern recording technology never endeared itself to me. My kind of sound is very simple, with a little bit of echo, and that’s about all that’s required to record it. … The way most records sound these days, everything is equalized. My kind of music is based on non-equalized parts, where one sound isn’t necessarily supposed to be as loud as another. When producers try to equal everything out, it’s to dismal effect on my records.”
From: The Chicago Tribune (1993)

24. “For me, none of the songs I’ve written has really dated. They capture something I’ve never been able to improve on, whatever their statement is. A song like ‘Maggie’s Farm’ – I could feel like that just the other day, and I could feel the same tomorrow. People say they’re ‘nostalgia,’ but I don’t know what that means really. A Tale of Two Cities was written 100 years ago; is that nostalgia? This term ‘nostalgic,’ it’s just another way people have of dealing with you and putting you some place they think they understand. It’s just another label.”
From: Sunday Times, 1984

25. “I usually play to the people in the back. I disregard the people in the front because usually these people have come to quite a few shows. They’re gonna be there anyway, and they’re gonna like what they hear one way or another. So we’re not trying to reach them. We’re trying to reach the people in the back who might not have been there before.”
From: Press Conference, Rome (2001)

26. “The relationship you have to a song can change over time. You can outgrow it, or it could come back to haunt you, come back stronger in a different way.”
From: The Wall Street Journal, 2022

27. “If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. 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.”
From: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature Speech (2016)

28. “Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.”
From: Chronicles: Volume One (2004)

29. “Sex and love have nothing to do with female and male. It’s just whatever two souls happen to be. It could be male and female, and it might not be male and female. It might be female and female or it might be male and male. You can try to pretend that it doesn’t happen, and you can make fun of it and be snide, but that’s not really the rightful thing.”
From: No Direction Home, 1966

30. “See, I’ve always been just about being an individual, with an individual point of view. If I’ve been anything, it’s probably that, and to let people know that it’s possible to do the impossible.”
From: Rolling Stone, 1986

READ MORE: Bob Dylan Album Opening Songs Ranked

31. “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.”
From: Rolling Stone, 1984

32. “Oh, and can’t forget Jimi Hendrix. I actually saw Jimi Hendrix perform when he was in a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames — something like that. And Jimi didn’t even sing. He was just the guitar player. He took some small songs of mine that nobody paid any attention to and pumped them up into the outer limits of the stratosphere and turned them all into classics. I have to thank Jimi, too. I wish he was here.”
From: Bob Dylan’s MusiCares Acceptance Speech (2015)

33. “As a people, we tend to feel very proud of ourselves because of democracy. We walk into that booth and cast our votes and wear that adhesive “I Voted” sticker as if it is a badge of honor. But the truth is more complex. We have as much responsibility coming out of the booth as we do going in. If the people we elect are sending people to their deaths or worse, sending other people half a world away—whom we never even consider because they don’t look like us or sound like us—to their deaths and we do nothing to stop it, aren’t we just as guilty? And if we want to see a war criminal all we have to do is look in the mirror.”
From: The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

34. “My background’s not all that important though. It’s what I’m doing now that counts.”
From: The New Yorker, 1964

35. “Well, it’s easy being Bob Dylan. It’s just trying to live up to what people would want Bob Dylan to do — that might be difficult, but it’s not really that difficult.”
From: KMEL-FM, San Francisco (1980)

36. “I meet witchy women. Somehow I attract them. I wish they’d leave me alone.”
From: Rolling Stone, 1978

37. “That town where I grew up hasn’t really really changed that much, so whatever was in the air before is probably still there. I go through once in a while coming down from Canada. I’ll stop there and wander around.”
From: Rolling Stone, 2009

38. “Music has given me a purpose. As a kid, there was rock. Later on, there was folk-blues music. It’s not something that I just listen to as a passive person. It has always been in my blood and it has never failed me. Because of that, I’m disconnected from a lot of the pressures of life. It disconnects you from what people think about you. Attitudes don’t really make too much difference when you can get on stage and play the guitar and sing songs. It’s natural for me. I don’t know why I was chosen to do it. I’m almost 40 now and I’m not tired of it yet.”
From: The Los Angeles Times, 1980

39. “I don’t know if I’ll still be doing this in 20 years’ time. Twenty years ago I couldn’t have imagined myself still doing it now. Actually I could if you don’t think in terms of time; years, minutes, hours and all that sort of thing. It’s destructive for me to do that.”
From: Q Magazine (1986)

40. “People want to know where I’m at, because they don’t know where they’re at.”
From: Minneapolis City Pages (1983)

Listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’

41. “Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner.”
From: 1965 Interview With Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston

42. “I can’t write in the cafeteria, everybody wants the napkin.”
From: Ramparts (1966)

43. “Sometimes it’s better to be quiet than to make a lot of noise; because when you’re quiet, you’re usually more in tune with the birds and bees and the phantom of life.”
From: Rock Express, 1978

44. “I’ve never minded touring. Touring is part of playing. Anybody can sit in the studio and make records, but that’s unrealistic and they can’t possibly be a meaningful performer. You have to do it night after night to understand what it’s all about. I’ve always loved to travel and play my songs, meet new people and see different places. I love to roll into town in the early morning and walk the deserted streets before anybody gets up. Love to see the sun come up over the highway. Then, of course, there’s playing on the stage in front of live people, feeling hearts and minds moving. Everybody don’t get to do that. Touring to me has never been any kind of hardship. It’s a privilege.”
From: USA Today (1988)

45. “Well, religion is repressive to a certain degree. Religion is another form of bondage which man invents to get himself to God.”
From: KMEX, Tucson, 1979

46. “The whole world is a prison. Life is a prison, we’re all inside the body. Freedom only comes from knowledge and knowledge is power. So just because you’re out there in the desert, facing an endless sky and an unknown nothingness, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re free. You’re trapped on the desert. Only knowledge of either yourself or the ultimate power can get you out of it.”
From: An Interview With Philip Fleishman (1978)

47. “I think there’s always a little boo in all of us. I wasn’t shattered by it. I didn’t cry. I don’t even understand it. I mean, what are they going to shatter, my ego? And it doesn’t even exist, they can’t hurt me with a boo.”
From: Chicago Daily News, 1965

48. “Saturn has been an obstacle in my planetary system. It’s been there for the last few ages and just removed itself from my system. I feel free and unburdened.”
From: Newsweek (1974)

49. “Every so often you have to have the law laid down so that you know what the law is. Then you can do whatever you please with it.”
From: Rolling Stone Australia, 1986

50. “No, my clothes are always usually stolen about every two months and I have to get new clothes all the time. Right now I am wearing a shirt and pants and things.”
From: An Interview With Mike Hurst (1965)

READ MORE: Top 20 Bob Dylan ’80s Songs

51. “The first song I wrote was a song to Brigitte Bardot. I don’t recall too much of it. It had only one chord. Well, it is all in the heart.”
From: Playboy, 1978

52. “I’Il never decay. Decay is when something has stopped living but hasn’t died yet, looking at your leg and seeing it all covered with creeping brown cancer. Decay turns me off. I’ll die first before I decay.”
From: The Saturday Evening Post (1966)

53. “I haven’t come down here to apologize for not being Shirley Temple.”
From: Radio Unnameable, 1966

54. “I’ve had it both ways. I have had good and bad accolades. If you pay any attention to them at all, it makes you pathological. It makes us pathological, to read about ourselves. You try not to pay attention or you try to discard it as soon as possible.”
From: The SunSentinel (1995)

55. “Join me, Bob Dylan, for Theme Time Radio Hour. The finest hour in American broadcasting. The hour of themes, dreams, and schemes. We make ’em rules and we break ’em rules. Join us and see how we do that. Right here, on XM.”
From: Theme Time Radio Promo (2006)

56. “Your mind and body go hand in hand. There has to be some kind of agreement. I like to think of the mind as spirit and the body as substance. How you integrate those two things, I have no idea. I just try to go on a straight line and stay on it, stay on the level.”
From: The New York Times, 2020

57. “If you copy somebody — and there’s nothing wrong with that — the top rule should be to go back and copy the guy that was there first. It’s like all the people who copied me over the years, too many of them just got me, they didn’t get what I got.”
From: Los Angeles Herald-Examiner (1985)

58. “I’m lucky. Not because I make a lot of bread. But because I can be around groovy people. | don’t have to fear anything and nobody around me has to fear anything. That’s where it’s at: bread, freedom and no fear.”
From: Cavalier (1965)

59. “I’m not Dylan. You’re Dylan.”
From: East Village Other, 1971

60. “The first girl that ever took a liking to me, her name was Gloria Story. Gloria Story, I mean, that was her real name. Second girlfriend was named Echo. Now, that’s pretty strange. I’ve never met anybody named Echo. I serenaded her underneath the ladder that went up to her window. And both these girls, by the way, brought out the poet in me.”
From: Jeff Rosen Interviews for ‘No Direction Home’ (2005)

Listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’

61. “I don’t know myself. I don’t know who I am. There’s a mirror on the inside of my dark glasses, otherwise | don’t interfere with my own private life.”
From: Press Conference in Denmark (1966)

62. “The problem with baseball teams is all the players get traded, and what your favorite team used to be — a couple of guys you really liked on the team, they’re not on the team now — and you can’t possibly make that team your favorite team.”
From: Rolling Stone, 2006

63. “It’s still hard for me to talk about playing, about songwriting. It’s like a guy digging a ditch. It’s hard to talk about how the dirt feels on the shovel.”
From: Rolling Stone, 1985

64. “I don’t even know what a drug is. I’ve never even seen a drug. I wouldn’t know probably what one looked like if I saw one.”
From: 1965 Press Conference

65. “Yeah, Bruce [Springsteen] is a very, very talented guy.”
From: Rock On, BBC Radio 1 (1981)

66. “To be honest, you know, I don’t have any hopes for the future and I just hope to have enough boots to be able to change them.”
From: KQED, San Francisco, 1965

67. “As far as my records are concerned the only difference success has brought is that I now feel I must make my records even better. Before I made records to please myself and though I still do this I’m now also conscious that the public deserves the best I can give. This I owe them.”
From: NME (1965)

68. “I never listen to any of my albums, once they are completed. I don’t want to be reminded. To me, I’ve done them. I find it like looking into a lifeless mirror.”
From: The Los Angeles Times, 1997

69. “I have my friends, I know who they are, I don’t need any more. I don’t see what you have to gain spiritually from talking to someone for a few minutes.”
From: The Courier (1965)

70. “I’m not bored. Don’t mistake my restlessness for boredom.”
From: New Times (1978)

READ MORE: The Best Song From Every Bob Dylan Album

71. “Well, listen, everything’s weird. You tell me something that’s not weird.”
From: Guitar World / Uncut, 1999

72. “George Harrison has come to visit me. The Beatles have asked me to work with them. I love the Beatles and I think it would be a good idea to do a jam session.”
From: Press Conference, Isle of Wight, 1969

73. “You got any questions for me? I love to talk.”
From: Chicago Sun-Times (1986)

74. “They really have to wear ties and stuff to the concert. Ties? Well, I’m gonna tell them they can take them off. That’s what I’m gonna do. Rules — man, that’s why I never lasted long in college. Too many rules.”
From: The Kenyon Collegian, 1964

75. “Love to me is a active thing. Love to me is an action type thing. It’s not a word it’s not a passive thing. If you love somebody you prove it.”
From: An Interview With Maurice Park, Melbourne, Australia (1986)

76. “I’m not good at defining things. Even if I could tell you what the song was about I wouldn’t. It’s up to the listener to figure out what it means to him.”
From: The Los Angeles Times, 2004

77. “When I arrived in Minneapolis it had seemed like a big city or a big town. When I left it was like some rural outpost that you see once from a passing train.”
From: An Interview With Cameron Crowe for Biograph (1985)

78. “It’s like, when I started out playing ��� it’s hard to put into words — I don’t know what the ’80s are going to be like. I imagine a lot of the glue is gonna hold a lot of things together which are sort of scattered now. Appearances of people you know, some wearing blue uniforms with badges, they are probably going to be standing side by side with housewives with their hair up in curlers, wanting the same things. All these different elements are going to I think be molded together. I think people are going to be more honest in the
’80s.”
From: Trouser Press (1979)

79. “Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light, it reflected the times, especially the presence of the atomic bomb which had preceded it by several years. Back then people feared the end of time. The big showdown between capitalism and communism was on the horizon. Rock and roll made you oblivious to the fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies put up. We lived under a death cloud; the air was radioactive. There was no tomorrow, any day it could all be over, life was cheap. That was the feeling at the time and I’m not exaggerating.”
From: A 2017 Interview With Bill Flanagan

80. “I like earning a lot of money.”
From: Radio 3, 1966

Listen to Bob Dylan’s ‘The Man in Me’

81. “Folk music is where it all starts and ends in many ways. If you don’t have that foundation, or if you’re not that knowledgeable about it and you don’t know how to control that, and you don’t feel historically tied to it, then what you’re doing is not going to be as strong as it could be.”
From: Rolling Stone, 2001

82.  “Canada seems to bridge a gap between the United States and Europe — and England. It’s a certain flair. And this is where | come from, this kind of setting — lakes and boats and bridges.”
From: An Interview With Ben Fong-Torres, Montreal (1974)

83. “You see, it’s all grown so serious, the writing-song business. It’s not that serious. The songs don’t painfully come out. They come out in a trick or two, or from something you might overhear. I’m just like any other songwriter, you pick up the things that are given to you.”
From: Sing Out!, 1968

84. “I’ve had a God-given sense of destiny. This is what I was put on earth to do. Just like Shakespeare was gonna write his plays, the Wright brothers were gonna invent an airplane, like Edison was gonna invent a telephone, I was put here to do this. I knew I was gonna do it better than anybody ever did it.”
From: Time Magazine (2001)

85. “I see myself as it all. Married man, poet, singer, songwriter, custodian, gatekeeper…all of it. I’ll be it all. I feel ‘confined’ when I have to choose one of the other. Don’t you?”
From: Rolling Stone, 1969