Top 621 Dylan Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

I've met Bob Dylan. We did one of those non-handshake handshakes. I was with all guys, and he shook hands with all of them, and then they said, 'And this is Kate,' and I put my hand out, and he didn't put his out. And then I took my hand away, and he put his out. It was one of those. We finally did shake. And then I fainted!

I don't even think any stimulants really help writing. You talk to most guys and they say, "Hey. I wrote this." And they're out of their head or they had a few beers or a bottle of whiskey. You wake up the next morning, it's usually pretty crap. But you know Dylan Thomas wrote some great poetry. Brendan Behan. You never know but ultimately I'd say you have to get up early in the morning and you're usually sober when you write your good stuff; it's hard work. So alcohol, keep it for chilling out, fun, and having a good time. Not for work.

You don't have to be the best guitar player, or have the best voice, or even be the best looking person - writing a song that moves people is worth more than all the other nonsense. (Just look at Bob Dylan - he's got almost no vocal range at all, but his songs are deeply moving and iconic.) If I had to offer one piece of advice: Write a song that moves people, and write it from within yourself. Your personal narrative is more engaging and moving than anything else you can imagine in your mind.

Well, it seems that one day Dylan was drivin' up to San Francisco from New Orleans or somewhere, when our record [House of the Rising Sun] came over his radio. When it was announced he said to Joan Baez -- who was with him at the time -- 'This'll be the first time I've heard this version', although it was number one in the States. So he listened to it, stopped the car, ran round the car five times, banged his head on the bumper and began leapin' about shouting 'It's great! It's great!'

I went to high school right outside Dallas, and (songwriter and performer) Michael Martin Murphey was a senior there when I was a sophomore or junior, really into folk and acoustic music. Larry Gross, who's the host of "Mountain Stage" on public radio, and B.W. Stevenson, also a musician, were there at the same time, too. Michael was a big inspiration -- through him I discovered Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Jimmy Rogers. Then I ran into Jerry Jeff Walker there in Dallas back when he was just a folk singer. Those are my earliest influences.

Whoa," Connor Stoll said. "Back up. Zoom in right there." "What?" Annabeth said nervously. "You see invaders?" "No, right there—Dylan's Candy Bar." Connor grinned at his brother. "Dude, it's open. And everyone is asleep. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "Connor!" Katie Gardner scolded. She sounded like her mother, Demeter. "This is serious. You are not going to loot a candy store in the middle of a war!" "Sorry," Connor muttered, but he didn't sound very ashamed.

The question now becomes about defining your terms. What is literature? Unless we allow it to encompass the oral tradition from which it grew, which means taking it back to Homer and beyond, it demands the written word - poetry and prose. [Bob] Dylan is no slouch at the written word, both in its own right, and transcribed from his lyrics, which have often been acclaimed as poetry and may well stand up as such. But that is not his métier.

I'm definitely not a laptop/midi/abelton guy. But there is a lot of music I like. I really like Bach organ music. I really like Chopin piano music. I really like Wendy Carlo's electronic music. I really like Miles Davis and John Mclaughlin jazz style. So I'm not only an old-school rocker, but I have to admit that I'm going to be listening to The Doors, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Bob Dylan many times a week.

[Peter] Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was my first go-to song in terms of getting into the zone and getting ready and then I quickly gravitated to rock and roll music in the mid-'60s with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana. So many of them are still around and still going strong. I go out to see them all the time.

I don't know what you wanna describe as Rock 'n' Roll, but I certainly thought that 60s stuff, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, changed the world a little bit. But the effect seems to have retreated. I think it's harder than we think to change the world. These things go in cycles. It doesn't seem to have done an awful lot of good, does it? You know, all the talk of racial harmony and equality in the world... we haven't got a long way since the 60s.

I definitely notice the absence of character in most poetry, which is not so say that I'm an innovator in that regard. Character-based poems are not weird or new by any stretch but they feel strange and new because the atmosphere is one in which no one does that. People always talk about, and with good reason, poetry's unpopularity. When people say that they forget or they brush aside the fact that in the middle part of the last century poetry was immensely popular. Dylan Thomas was basically a rock star; so was Anne Sexton.

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging. ... Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio, too. ... And I think it's safe to say that the single very impressive figure to me was Merle Haggard. ... Dylan can do no wrong. ... Glenn Gould was my hero. Glenn Gould was my idol. I loved him. ... I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.

I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.

One night around that time, at Hammersmith, Bob Dylan was about to go into [his 1963 classic] 'Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.He said, 'Hey, Bucky! Play mandolin on this.' I am not really a mandolin player; I could only play in certain keys. Halfway through, he stops the band, turns to the audience and points to me. He says: 'He isn't playing, he's miming.' And then: 'Should I fire him?' The whole audience yells.

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.

When I first knew Bob Dylan, he lived in the Village. And for a man who, years after, would disdain publicity or any attempts at interviews, whenever I'd write something about him, he'd be on the street corner saying, `When's it going to run? When's it going to run?' But I must say that album that was - it was the second album he did, and though I've never been a fan of his guitar-playing, he did - I have to admit, he did catch the Zeitgeist of the time.

Honey, I've watched a lot of 90210. The parents weren't even on the show once Brandon and Brenda went to college. This is your time - you're supposed to going to frat parties and getting back together with Dylan." "Why does everybody want me to go to frat parties?" "Who wants you to go to frat parties? I was just kidding. Don't hang out with frat guys, Cath, they're terrible. All they do is get drunk and watch 90210.

The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home.

There's no reason - not yet, anyway - to believe [Bob] Dylan himself endorses such an attitude; or that he would think of himself as a more profound and worthy recipient than, for instance, any of the brilliant Motown or girl-group lyricists who are more likely to be awarded a Nobel prize for chemistry than for literature. Whether there is more truth and humanity in his best lyrics than in Abba's, or less, is unquantifiable, and it would be meretricious to attempt such a calculation in contesting an argument he has been dragged into.

[on River Phoenix] I would love to see what kind of choices he would be making now if he was still around, some of the characters that he would have played. I mean, to me he was like a rock star, you know, he had it all: he had the looks, he had a great name, he had an attitude, an energy, an excitement about him. He was instinctively like a, he was a rebel, you know? He was kind of Bob Dylan to me, at times, and he had a lot to say. And I've never seen too many interviews by him, but the ones that I saw were pretty electric, pretty... he was switched on, definitely.