Explore Quotes by Bob Dylan

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work.

So happy just to be alive, _x000D_ Underneath the sky of blue, _x000D_ On this new morning, new morning, _x000D_ On this new morning with you.

People are going to say, ‘Well, it’s not very truthful.’ But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth. It’s like people who read Shakespeare plays, but they never see a Shakespeare play. I think they just use his name.

I was headed 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.

Peace is the time it takes to reload your rifle.

I believe that instinct is what makes a genius a genius.

I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

It may look like I'm moving but I'm standing still.

An artist has got to 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. And, as long as you can stay in that realm you'll sort of be alright.

Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.

It rubs me the wrong way, a camera... It's a frightening thing...Cameras make ghosts out of people.

I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw.

People call you this or that. But I can't respond because then it seems like I'm defensive, you know, what does it matter, really?

You get older. You start having hopes for other people rather than yourself.

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

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 any one but inspire them?

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.