Top 880 Quotes & Sayings by Bob Dylan - Page 15

I set my monkey on the log, and ordered him to do the Dog. He wagged his tail and shook his head, and he went and did the Cat instead.

"Tangled Up in Blue," shifts perspective several times during the song to tell a "tangled" version of [Bob] Dylan's marriage and dissolution.

As he weeps to wicked birds of prey, who pick up on his bread crumb sins, and there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.

It was [meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy] like looking at my mirror image.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark as human gods aim for their mark.

The exploitation and superficiality of mainstream America is the object not of [Bob] Dylan's hipster scorn, but of an apocalyptic parable of holy fools and righteous thieves - the kind of imagery that Dylan's later work would explore more fully.

A brilliant 1989 album, Oh Mercy; some career retrospectives; and two albums of American folk songs, with just Bob Dylan and his guitar and harmonica. All that culminated in the Grammy-winning comeback album, Time Out of Mind (1997). Once again, just as Dylan seemed to be out of it, he was back at the top of his game.

I don't think there's enough guns.

Trying to create a next world war, he found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor, he said I never engaged in this kind of thing before, but yes I think it can be very easily done.

Lord knows I've paid my dues getting through, tangled up in blue.

Up north, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials that played pre-rock 'n' roll things - country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin' Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn't even know where Alabama was.

Every singer has three or four or five techniques, and you can force them together in different combinations. Some of the techniques you discard along the way, and pick up others. But you do need them. It's just like anything. You have to know certain things about what you're doing that other people don't know. Singing has to do with techniques and how many you use at the same time. One alone doesn't work. There's no point to going over three. But you might interchange them whenever you feel like it. It's a bit like alchemy.

We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, "My character this, and my character that." Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me.

Just in time for Bob Dylan to recoil from the attention, leave the city for Woodstock, and turn his back on fame.

It was better to be in chains with friends than in a garden with strangers. [An ancient Persian proverb.] So true, huh?

His [Bob Dylan] humour was dry and splendid.

Whatever people see - TV in my mind forms people's opinions.

The atom bomb fueled the entire world that came after it. It showed that indiscriminate killing and indiscriminate homicide on a mass level was possible ... whereas if you look at warfare up until that point, you had to see somebody to shoot them or maim them, you had to look at them. You don't have to do that anymore.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" [of Bob Dylan] captures, in word-salad format, life in an encroaching police state.

How many times have you heard someone say If I had his money I'd do things my way Hmm, but little they know Hmm, it's so hard to find One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

Anger and jealousy's all that he sells us, he's content when you're under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb.

Sometimes you get out from behind the wheel and let someone else step on the gas.

America was founded on the backs of slaves.

Along with some of the worst music of Bob Dylan's career ("Self-Portrait," 1970), this period produced some gems - including many songs recorded with The Band in '67 but not released until years later.

I was down in the sewer with some little lover.

When you're sad and when you're lonely and you haven't got a friend, just remember that death is not the end.

Fame it's like... When you look through a window, say you pass a little pub, or an inn. You look through the window and you see people talking and carrying on. You,can watch outside the window and see them all being very real with each other. But when you walk into the room, it's over. I don't pay any attention to it.

I see the turning of the page, curtain rising on a new age, see the groom still waiting at the altar.

Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radio/record player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing.

I think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop.

If you wanted to, it would be easy to find some crappy lyrics [of Bob Dylan] from the Eighties to undermine the Nobel Prize.

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

Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.

Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel. You all been down and lonesome, you know just how a poor man feels.

[Bob] Dylan's broken-heart songs are so much better. Like "Simple Twist of Fate".

You know, sometimes a person's reputation can be far more colossal than the influence of the person. I don't pay any attention to it anymore.

Ironically, this was Bob Dylan's period [1967-74] of greatest fame.

In the meantime [1965-67], [Bob] Dylan was again writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."

The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time.

In this age of fiberglass, I'm searching for a gem.