Explore Quotes by Bob Dylan

When you got nothin' / You got nothin' to lose.

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I'm not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I've never thought about that before! He said, When you're not following me, you're resisting me.

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

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.

My big fear was that my guitar would go out of tune.

Every man's conscience is vile and depraved / You cannot depend on it to be your guide when it’s you who must keep it satisfied.

Sometimes the silence can be like thunder.

You're better than no one and no one is better than you.

I've been up the mountain and I had a choice. Should I come down? So I came down. God said, Okay, you've been up on the mountain, now you go down. You're on your own, free. Check in later, but now you're on your own.

Suddenly I found you and the spirit in me sings, Don't have to look no further, You're the soul of many things.

If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something - something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it.

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

Come mothers and fathers_x000D_Throughout the land_x000D_And don't criticize_x000D_What you can't understand_x000D_Your sons and your daughters_x000D_Are beyond your command_x000D_Your old road is_x000D_Rapidly agin'_x000D_Please get out of the new one_x000D_If you can't lend your hand_x000D_For the times they are a-changin'.

There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probaby, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs. Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

You don't write a song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it.

If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

For them that think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely.

... we're living in a Machiavellian world, whether we like it or we don't.