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Bob Dylan Quotes

born 1941 United States

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".

United States
Guitarists
Nobel laureates
Poets
Singer-songwriters

Also known as: Dylan, Bob, Slow Train (Bob Dylan song)

Random Bob Dylan quote

94 quotes

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

The Times They Are A-Changin (1964)

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.

Chronicles: Vol. One (2004)

God, I'm glad I'm not me.

Said when reading a newspaper article about himself in Dont Look Back (1967)

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)

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.

Chronicles: Vol. One (2004)

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Oh God said to Abraham, Kill me a son.

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.

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.

Chronicles: Vol. One (2004)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Bob Dylan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.