Bob Dylan Songs Quotes

#1. I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs to see how he works. I've gotten into writing story-songs.

Scott Weiland

#2. I think everyone mentions Bob Dylan, but he's someone I just admire so much as a songwriter. I think people write songs, and then there's Bob Dylan songs. He's one step ahead of just everybody else.

Tom Odell

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

Jackson Browne

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album.

John Mellencamp

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. Another Holy Grail for some collectors is Bob Dylan's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, the 1963 pressing that has four songs that were deleted from subsequent pressings, known to fetch up to $35,000 in stereo and $16,500 in mono in excellent condition. 1970s

Anonymous

#12. Bob Dylan and John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, these are soul guys. Bruce Springsteen might not sing like Otis Redding, but he sings with white soul. He's singing and he's writing songs from the bottom of his gut.

Robin Thicke

#13. With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims,
And your match-book songs and your gypsy hymns,
Who among them would try to impress you?
-Bob Dylan, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (1966)

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

#15. Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

Kurt Cobain

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. There were times in my career when I would try to write songs like Bob Dylan ... Artists get hooked up in that. To be a follower, you lose.

Del Shannon

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

Robert Fitzgerald

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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