1. A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom. 2. What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
3. People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
5. At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.
6. I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.
7. All I can do is be me, whoever that is.
9. I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.
11. Democracy don't rule the world. You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid.
12. Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.
14. He not busy being born is busy dying.
15. Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.
16. I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
17. A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
19. A poem is a naked person...Some people say that I am a poet.
20. This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.
21. To live outside the law, you must be honest.
23. I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
25. No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.
26. Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.
27. Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.
29. A lot of people can't stand touring but to me it's like breathing. I do it because I'm driven to do it.
30. I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
31. I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds.
33. There is nothing so stable as change.
34. The radio makes hideous sounds.
35. I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.
37. You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.
38. When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?
40. But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.
41. I'm just glad to be feeling better. I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon.
42. Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.
44. 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.
45. Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything.
46. I stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed...so drastically, I couldn't believe it myself.
48. Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.
50. Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast.
51. Folk music is a bunch of fat people.
52. Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.
54. 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.
55. I can't act!
56. I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.
58. I can't stand to see myself on television.
59. I don't think I'm tangible to myself.
60. 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.
62. I never saw myself as a folk singer.
63. I kinda live where I find myself.
64. 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.
66. I realize I don't do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.
67. I think I have a dualistic nature.
68. I'm inconsistent, even to myself.
70. I'm mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it's the only place where I'm happy.
71. I'm more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.
72. I'm sick of giving creeps money off my soul.
74. I'm speaking for all of us. I'm the spokesman for a generation.
75. I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that.
76. Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.
77. It's not easy to define poetry.
79. It's hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.
81. My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.
82. 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.
83. Nothing can affect my voice, it's so bad.
85. Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.
86. The people in my songs are all me.
87. The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots.
89. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.
90. What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.
92. You call yourself what you want to call yourself.
93. What good are fans? You can't eat applause for breakfast. You can't sleep with it.
94. You can't be happy by doing something groovy.
96. You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.
97. You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.
99. You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.
100. Play it fuckin' loud!
101. Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.
102. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.
103. Don't criticize what you can't understand.
104. Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean.
106. Gonna change my way of thinking, make my self a different set of rules. Gonna put my good foot forward and stop being influenced by fools.
107. May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.
109. When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks.
111. You can never be wise and be in love at the same time.
112. DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.
114. You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more.
115. To live outside the law you must be honest.
117. Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want (Bob Dylan's dad)
118. It's a wicked life, but what the hell, the stars ain't falling down.
119. You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody...
121. When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?
122. There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.
123. If the point is sharp, and the arrow is swift, it can pierce through the dust no matter how thick.
124. Swallow your pride, you will not die, it's not poison.
126. Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.
128. Because Dickens and Dostoevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.
129. 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.
131. I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned - didn't know whether I was stoned or straight. (Referring to the first Woody Guthrie record he ever heard, on Chronicles 2004)
132. Morality has nothing in common with politics. (Chronicles: Vol. One 2004)
138. When I first heard (Elvis Presley's) voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody; and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.
140. Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say: "Son," he said, "you know it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways. (from his acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys in 1991)
142. 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.
143. Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12. (when asked what his songs are "about")
145. I've only written four songs in my whole life, but I've written those four songs a million times.
147. People can learn everything about me through my songs, if they know where to look.
149. They'd like to use my tunes for different beer companies and perfumes and automobiles. I get approached on all that stuff. But, shit, I didn't write them for that reason. That's never been my scene.
151. My childhood is so far away…it's like I don't even remember being a child. I think it was someone else who was a child.
152. 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.
154. What the songwriter does is just connect the dots. The ends he sees and the ones given to him and he connects them.
158. I think of myself as a song-and-dance man.
159. Maybe in the '90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the '80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.
161. 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 to inspire them?
162. It rubs me the wrong way, a camera…It's a frightening thing…Cameras make ghosts out of people.
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