
Top 84 Bob Dylan Music Quotes
#3. treat you like a criminal," he said, showing a slide of an inmate in striped prison garb. Then a slide of Bob Dylan came on the screen. "People want to own the music they love.
Walter Isaacson
#4. Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He's not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.
Al Kooper
#5. She's got everything she needs; she's an artist, she don't look back.
Bob Dylan
#6. I just don't hear anyone else making the music I'm making in my head, so I'll have to do it myself.
Bob Dylan
#7. I love that Euro-pop dance music, but with girl power. I also listen to Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. I have a Beatles song tattooed on my foot. I'm all over the place.
Hilary Duff
#8. People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.
Bob Dylan
#9. In New York, I'm around a lot of the reasons I started playing music in the first place. I live right behind Matt Umanov Guitars. I live on the street that Suze Rotolo and Bob Dylan were walking down on the album cover. I recognize the history.
Steve Earle
#10. Just a reminder, if you tell anyone about what happened with Jonah last night, I'll destroy all of my writing and never play music again.
Bob Dylan
#11. Joaquin Sabina is one of my favorites. He's like a legend. He's like our Bob Dylan, or our Bruce Springsteen. He's one of the most talented writers of our Latin music.
Juanes
#12. It's like there's the rest of the world, and then there's America. Part of the reason I would really love continue to making music over here because so much of American music has inspired me, whether it's Jeff Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen.
Tom Odell
#13. Folk music is a bunch of fat people.
Bob Dylan
#14. I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.
Pete Seeger
#16. In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.
Iggy Pop
#17. Life is a musical influence in my experience. But as far as actual music and actual bands, uh, I'll just look at my little collection here. Let's see. Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, U2, The Talking Heads, Prince and the Revolution, Michael Jackson's Thriller was a huge one.
Jeremy Enigk
#18. In Paris in 1964 was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all. Paul got the record (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) from a French DJ. For three weeks in Paris we didn't stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan.
John Lennon
#19. I love Country Music but what happened to it?
Bob Dylan
#20. If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.
Bob Dylan
#21. I still listen to a lot of the classics from Bob Dylan and John Martin, but I love electronic music as well. I'm a big fan of an Australian DJ and producer called Flume, who I think is incredible. He should be more successful in the U.K.!
Gabrielle Aplin
#22. My songs are personal music, they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard.
Bob Dylan
#23. I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan
#24. I really was never any more than what I was -a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.
Bob Dylan
#25. I don't listen to hard rock or heavy metal. I suppose I've always been influenced by folk music, I'm a big Bob Dylan fan.
Roger Glover
#26. Music attracts the angels in the universe.
Bob Dylan
#27. My musical influence is really from my father. He was a DJ in college. My parents met at New York University. So he listened to, you know, Motown, and he listened to Bob Dylan. He listened to Grateful Dead and Rolling Stones, but he also listened to reggae music. And he collected vinyl.
Talib Kweli
#28. I think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop.
Bob Dylan
#29. I have plenty of good friends that I think the world of - and Bob [Dylan] is one of them, and I like his music - but with some others ... their music I just don't care too much about all of it. Some of it I like.
Ralph Stanley
#30. I think people are 'just creative,' and this can be expressed in a number of ways. Bob Dylan and David Bowie create both music and art.
Ronnie Wood
#31. Do not trust people who call themselves musicians or record collectors who say that they don't like Bob Dylan or the Beatles. They do not love music if those words come out of their mouths.
Jack White
#32. Paste Magazine needs to stay in business! It's the first non-sensational quality music and film publication that doesn't only attempt to appeal to middle-aged male Bob Dylan completionists! And there are still many of us who love to pick up a print magazine instead of going online.
Nina Persson
#33. When I started writing again, especially when I listened to French music and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, I realized that these lots talked about themselves. The greatest artists, they didn't sing; they only spoke.
Benjamin Clementine
#34. People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
P.J. Harvey
#35. I asked Bob Dylan to paint the album cover for 'Music from Big Pink.' He said, 'Yeah, let me see what I can come up with.'
Robbie Robertson
#36. My main influences are pop and folk music - Bob Lind, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Motown collection, The Zombies, Elliott Smith, and a ton of 70's AM radio hits. I love powerpop too.
Greta Salpeter
#37. I wouldn't even think of playing music if I was
born in these times. I wouldn't even listen to the radio.
Bob Dylan
#38. 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.
Bob Dylan
#39. I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.
Henry Rollins
#40. You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.
Bob Dylan
#42. Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he's standing in front of you
Bob Dylan
#43. If it works for the piece of music, I'm going to use it. I don't want to be limited any more than [Bob] Dylan wanted to be limited by not using an electric guitar.
Linda Perhacs
#44. A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
Bob Dylan
#45. Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it's not just a record, it's a movement.
Seth Godin
#46. I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.
Bonnie Raitt
#47. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.
Bob Dylan
#48. Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution.
Bob Dylan
#49. 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.
Bob Dylan
#50. You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live ...
Bob Dylan
#51. My expectations for myself were never high. I had a very unusual way of writing songs and of thinking about music. I wasn't at all like Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel. I was completely different - I didn't have a David Geffen at my side.
Don McLean
#52. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.
Bob Dylan
#53. I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
Clive Davis
#54. Growing up, I didn't really like folk music - I wasn't a fan of Bob Dylan. I grew up mostly listening to rap and hip-hop; it was this new form of music.
Max Casella
#55. The country music stations plays soft but there's nothing, really nothing to turn off.
Bob Dylan
#56. There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief ...
Bob Dylan
#57. What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.
Justin Townes Earle
#58. We are at a crossroads in the music business: with the rise of the internet, the world we live in has changed, and the past is not coming back. But I see the glass as half-full: the internet and social networking are new avenues for the next Bob Dylan to be born on.
Jon Bon Jovi
#59. Having hits buries a singer in the past. A lot of singers hide in the past because it's safer back there. If you've ever heard today's country music, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Bob Dylan
#60. To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.
Quentin Tarantino
#61. When it came time to hire a guitar player ... I didn't even have to think about it ... Mike Bloomfield was the best guitar player I'd ever heard ...
Bob Dylan
#62. You better start swimming, or you'll sink like a stone. Because the Time's they are a-changing.
Bob Dylan
#63. Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.
Lyle Lovett
#64. Splashing about in mud in the cold is not my thing. I made an attempt to go to the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1969 when Bob Dylan was playing, but we never made it. We hired a boat from Lymington, but got lost, and by the time we got there the music was over. I wasn't too sad, to be honest.
Tony Blackburn
#65. Thinking of a series of dreams
Where the time and the tempo fly
And there's no exit in any direction
'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes
Bob Dylan
#66. Everybody who I ever cared about has told me that they like my music: Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Al Green, The Spinners, Smokey Robinson. Everybody that matters.
Daryl Hall
#68. A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles. In fact, reading Sean Wilentz's Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song.
Martin Scorsese
#69. Gordon Lightfoot has created some of the most beautiful and lasting music of our time. He is Bob Dylan's favorite singer/songwriter - high praise from the best of us, applauded by the rest of us.
Kris Kristofferson
#70. 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.
Bob Dylan
#71. I've listened to Dylan my entire life. My dad was a huge Bob Dylan fan, so we listened to his music, Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, and all that kind of stuff. It opened up a whole world of this music that I'm now obsessed with.
Oscar Isaac
#72. My dad influenced my musical taste. I grew up listening to Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones and a bunch of rock music from the '60s. Now, instead of watching TV, I'll play a record from start to finish.
Sarah Hay
#73. My big fear was that my guitar would go out of tune.
Bob Dylan
#74. Nd songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.
Bob Dylan
#75. I was really lost for a while in my teens. I was angry. But when I found music - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell - it was a new discovery. It was a door to this other world where I wanted to be.
Ray Lamontagne
#76. My dad was a huge Bob Dylan fan, so we listened to his music, Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, and all that kind of stuff.
Oscar Isaac
#77. I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.
Bob Dylan
#78. Bob Dylan was the source of pop music's unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.
Jon Landau
#79. Hen I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail
Bob Dylan
#80. Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.
Patti Smith
#81. And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.
Bob Dylan
#82. He [Johnny Cash] always wanted to use his music to lift other people up, to say no matter how much trouble, there's hope. That was always his message in his songs. That's why he and [Bob] Dylan bonded so much, because they were both trying to do something meaningful.
Robert Hilburn
#83. When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to loose.
Bob Dylan
#84. If you ever tell anyone about Jonah's sexual dysfunction, I'll never play music again.
Bob Dylan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top