Bob Dylan Song Quotes

#1. I like lots of songs, and I find it quite interesting to do [cover songs] from time to time. My first solo hit was in 1973, the [Bob] Dylan song "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall."

Bryan Ferry

#2. I'm going to do whatever the world tells me to. I'm going to act like I'm in a goddamn Bob Dylan song and blow in the direction of the wind. I'm going to pretend my future's wide open, and that anything can happen.

Nicola Yoon

#3. 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

#4. Most songs have bridges in them, to distract listeners from the main verses of a song so they don't get bored. My songs don't have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them.

Bob Dylan

#5. A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter.

Bob Dylan

#6. I like spiritual songs. They struck me as truthful and serious. They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment.

Bob Dylan

#7. I don't write the songs; I just write 'em down.

Bob Dylan

#8. reality has too many heads

Bob Dylan

#9. 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

#10. May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.

Bob Dylan

#11. He swift don't win the race. It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.

Bob Dylan

#12. Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now

Bob Dylan

#13. I can picture the color of the song, or the shape of it, or who it is that I'm trying to appeal to, in the song, and what I'm trying to, almost, reinforce my feelings for. And I know that sounds sort of vague and abstract, but I've got a handle on it when I'm doing it.

Bob Dylan

#14. But, in the end, even a song that's as politically bland as Blowin in the Wind, you probably wouldn't get up and sing that now, whereas some of Bob Dylan's love songs that were contemporary with that, like say Girl from the North Country, you can still get up an play now.

Billy Bragg

#15. The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about. They're an escape.

Bob Dylan

#16. 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

#17. People think they know me from my songs. But my repertoire of songs is so wide-ranging that you'd have to be a madman to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs.

Bob Dylan

#18. And I'll know my song well before I start singing

Bob Dylan

#19. I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul...

Bob Dylan

#20. The highlight of my career? That's easy, Elvis recording one of my songs.

Bob Dylan

#21. My favorite Dylan song? I think it's 'Just Like a Woman.' It always makes me cry.

Bob Saget

#22. Songs are like fish. You just gotta have your line in the water. And it's a bad idea to fish downstream from Bob Dylan.

Arlo Guthrie

#23. That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

Bob Dylan

#24. Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.

Peter Blegvad

#25. The song was there before me, before I came along. I just sorta came down and just sorta took it down with a pencil, but it was there before I came around.

Bob Dylan

#26. You have to look at every one of your songs and be able to identify with them in a meaningful way. You can hardly sing your songs unless you're in them. If you want to fake it, go ahead. Fake it if you want. But I'm not that kind of singer.

Bob Dylan

#27. 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

#28. I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.

Bob Dylan

#29. In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.

George Clooney

#30. The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face

Bob Dylan

#31. 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

#32. I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.

Bob Dylan

#33. I count the years and I shed no tears; I'm blinded to what might have been. Nature's voice makes my heart rejoice; play me the wild song of the wind.

Bob Dylan

#34. Lay down the song you strum,
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum.

Bob Dylan

#35. I need all kinds of songs - fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas - and they all get juggled around during a live show. I've been trying for years to come up with songs that have the feeling of a Shakespearean drama, so I'm always starting with that.

Bob Dylan

#36. Back in the old days, everyone was shocked if a band had a sponsor for their tour. Now, Bob Dylan can do a commercial for Victoria's Secret and people don't really blink; the Beatles' songs are in all sorts of commercials these days and it doesn't seem to offend anybody. The times are changing.

Judd Apatow

#37. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams ... all of them are different styles, but those are the songs that make the times ... they're the songs that last through time.

Dolly Parton

#38. You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live ...

Bob Dylan

#39. In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

Bob Dylan

#40. When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole '60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.

Jason Reeves

#41. I heard Pete Seeger records when I was a kid. I saw Bob Dylan when I was about 12. The first song I ever learned to play was a song by Phil Ochs.

Ketch Secor

#42. Once you think you know the song, then you have go and see how other people have done it.

Bob Dylan

#43. Done laid around, done stayed around
This old town too long
And it seems like I've got to travel on

Bob Dylan

#44. There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief ...

Bob Dylan

#45. 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

#46. If I made records for my own pleasure, I would only record Charley Patton songs.

Bob Dylan

#47. In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn't see and weren't there for, and you have to do it as if you were.

Bob Dylan

#48. Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of [Bob] Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.

John Lennon

#49. I can see God in a daisy. I can see God at night in the wind and rain. I see Creation just about everywhere. The highest form of song is prayer. King David's, Solomon's, the wailing of a coyote, the rumble of the Earth.

Bob Dylan

#50. Well, the moral of the story, The moral of this song, Is simply that one should never be Where one does not belong. So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin', Help him with his load, And don't go mistaking Paradise For that home across the road.

Bob Dylan

#51. As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant.

Bob Dylan

#52. 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

#53. Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.

Bob Dylan

#54. Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem.

Bob Dylan

#55. A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Bob Dylan

#56. My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

Bob Dylan

#57. Then on to all the terrific american songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. Whoever wrote and sang in the song form I have appreciated.

Tom Chapin

#58. You don't write a song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it.

Bob Dylan

#59. Once I can focus in on something, I just play it in my mind until an idea comes from out of nowhere, and it's usually the key to the whole song. It's the idea that matters. It's like electricity was around long before Edison harnessed it.

Bob Dylan

#60. How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?

Bob Dylan

#61. I just wanted a song to sing, and there came a point where I couldn't sing anything ... nobo dy else was writing what I wanted to sing. I couldn't find it anywhere. If I could I probably would never have started writing.

Bob Dylan

#62. Don't criticize what you can't understand.

Bob Dylan

#63. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

Bob Dylan

#64. But can a song stop a war? If Bob Marley and Bob Dylan couldn't do it, it can't be done.

Henry Rollins

#65. 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

#66. If you don't have to write songs, why write them? I've got enough where I don't really feel the urge to write anything additional.

Bob Dylan

#67. I can't write story-songs, like I couldn't write a Bob Dylan or Tom Waits song. I can only write whatever weird phrases come into my head, and hope that they're good.

Jay Watson

#68. And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my song well before I start singin

Bob Dylan

#69. I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that.

Bob Dylan

#70. I can't see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That's terrible.

Bob Dylan

#71. Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting
If I could hear his heart softly pounding
Yes, and only if he was lying by me
Would I lie in my bed once again.

Bob Dylan