Top 100 Quotes About Bob Dylan
#1. I never could understand - it was impossible for me to get my head around - what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan's beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio.
Greil Marcus
#2. I've had mentors who were kind of the troubadour singer-songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and that's just what I've always liked - people who would talk real honestly about their lives and their circumstance.
Jewel
#3. Well, I love Bob Dylan, let's make that clear. He's one of my musical heroes.
Tim Heidecker
#4. One month I'll be completely obsessed with Bob Dylan and the next Arcade Fire. I like early Elton John and David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. I listen to a lot of American bands. But I like listening to new bands, too.
Tom Odell
#5. 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
#6. And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.
Michael Stipe
#7. 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
#8. As soon as I graduated from high school I was off to the biggest college my parents could afford, Colorado University at Boulder, having seen students there who looked a lot like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
Susan Schneider
#9. Dave Van Ronk, for those who don't know him - probably most don't know - was a folk singer. He's kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.
Ethan Coen
#10. When I was playing with Bob Dylan in, like, 1966, I was, like, 20 years old.
Robbie Robertson
#11. 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
#12. If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.
Bob Dylan
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. I'm trying to get as far way from myself as I can.........from Things Have Changed by Bob Dylan (not a book but .........)
Bob Dylan
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Any real Bob Dylan fan would sleep with Jonah Lehrer.
Bob Dylan
#19. I listen to Radio 4 and put the iPod on shuffle. I like the randomness of, say, the Stones, then something from Nina Simone, Nick Drake or Bob Dylan.
Catherine McCormack
#20. I've met Bob Dylan's bodyguards, and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table, he's sadly mistaken,
Townes Van Zandt
#21. 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
#22. In other words, I'd say the whole story of Bob Dylan is one man's search for God. The turns and the steps he takes to find God are his business. I think he went to a study group at the Vineyard, and it created a lot of excitement.
T Bone Burnett
#23. 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
#24. I'll never be Bob Dylan. He's the master.
Neil Young
#25. Somebody had to be Bob Dylan. I guess I was best equipped to do the job.
Bob Dylan
#26. 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
#27. Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes.
Pete Townshend
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. snatch of an old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him, something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice.
Stephen King
#31. Second records aren't usually very good. Even Bob Dylan's was a bit disappointing.
Madeleine Peyroux
#32. When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
Johnny Depp
#33. 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
#34. I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield.
Eileen Myles
#35. Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He's not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.
Al Kooper
#36. Bob Dylan said, "The executioner's face is always well-hidden". That's the problem: The cross pulls that hood off.
Robert Barron
#37. 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
#38. Bob Dylan has always sealed his decisions with the unexplainable. His motives for withholding the release of the magnificent 'Basement Tapes' will be as forever obscure as Brian Wilson's reasons for the destruction of the tapes for 'Smile.'
Jon Landau
#39. 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
#40. I love Bob Dylan, I really do. I love his early work, I love the first time he plugged in electrically, I love his Christian albums, I love his other albums.
Johnny Cash
#41. Everybody is waiting for cooler weather
and I am just waiting for you
. (Bob Dylan in a letter)
Suze Rotolo
#42. 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
#43. The early Bob Dylan was compulsively drawn to the conflict between stability and the search for immortality.
Jon Landau
#44. As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too.
Ric Ocasek
#45. 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
#46. I love Bob Dylan. Who doesn't? He tapped into some kind of vein and it keeps on keeping on. There's nobody like him. He's unique, and just ... way out cool.
David Lynch
#47. The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.
Ben Mendelsohn
#48. I'm just average, common too. I'm just like him and the same as you. I'm everybody's brother and son. I'm no different than anyone.
Bob Dylan - Talking WWIII Blues
Bob Dylan
#49. The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
#50. But you have to understand, my beard is so nasty. I mean, it's the only beard in the history of Western civilization that makes Bob Dylan's beard look good.
Bill Walton
#51. Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying.
Peter Thiel
#52. Bob Dylan's not a hype and a haircut: he's the real thing.
Benmont Tench
#53. We didn't have the phrase 'style icon' when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets - I liked how they dressed - and Catholic school boys.
Patti Smith
#54. If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There's always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.
Greil Marcus
#55. 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
#56. I think I'm the oldest new Bob Dylan around. I predate Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbat and John Prine. I was probably the first of the new Bob Dylans.
Loudon Wainwright III
#57. Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan I heard when I was 13. It was one of those things where it was like, "Hey, the world is much bigger than you imagined as a little kid."
Ezra Furman
#58. I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after "Like A Rolling Stone".
Al Kooper
#59. I really believe that Bob Dylan and others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a voice at last.
David Bowie
#60. I was buying Bob Dylan mainly, everything I could get hold of by him.
Robyn Hitchcock
#61. Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.
Allen Ginsberg
#62. All I can do is be me, whatever that is. Bob Dylan
Alm Hlgh
#63. I knew Bob Dylan was searching for the truth and had been for years. And anyone who Really wants the truth ends up at Jesus
Johnny Cash
#64. 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
#65. In the '60s, I used to love rock magazines; I'd cut out pictures of Bob Dylan and John Lennon.
Patti Smith
#66. Back seat drivers don't know the feel of the wheel
but they sho' know how to make a fuss"
Bob Dylan/Bonnie Raitt, "Let's Keep It Between Us," 1982
Bob Dylan
#67. I have no doubt that if I met Bob Dylan, it would be disappointing - and annoying to him. But that's why I like Bob Dylan.
Willem Dafoe
#68. Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.
Al Kooper
#69. We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie ... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.
Buzz Osborne
#70. I first met (Bob Dylan) in '65. We've had a friendship for a long time. He decided to play on a record I was making in New York. We were just friends playing together.
Doug Sahm
#71. 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
#72. My heroes, I couldn't imagine them practicing. Like Bob Dylan, you know? Bob Dylan's a very, very good guitar player, but it's like he's trying to hide it. I always loved this attitude. When you're very good ... it's like being an athlete - and I always hated sports!
Laurent Brancowitz
#73. 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
#74. Theophilus Crowe's mobile phone played eight bars of "Tangled Up in Blue" in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan.
Christopher Moore
#75. 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
#76. Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.
Pete Townshend
#77. 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
#78. Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.
Peter Fonda
#79. As Bob Dylan once said, "'I am the Lord thy God' is a fine saying, as long as it's the right person who's saying it.
N. T. Wright
#80. 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
#81. I always remember what Bob Dylan said in that [Martin] Scorsese documentary on him. When he was asked about Joan Baez's complaints about the way he treated her when they were together, Dylan laughed and said, "It's impossible to be in love and wise at the same time."
Richard Gere
#82. Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope to catch something. And I don't think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything.
Arlo Guthrie
#83. 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
#84. Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad 'Joey,' Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia.
Tom Folsom
#85. I want to see Bob Dylan do sketch comedy. I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan.
Bradley Whitford
#86. Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won't bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records.
Frank Black
#87. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen.
Neil Gaiman
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. My secret heroes were Joe Morello, Ray Charles - who is, in my opinion, the most dominant figure in musical history in the 21st century - and Frank Sinatra. Those are my heroes. And as a writer, when Bob Dylan came along, it was a miracle because he gave us all permission to say anything!
J. D. Souther
#93. I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan songs to see how he works. I've gotten into writing story-songs.
Scott Weiland
#94. The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.
Dennis Miller
#95. You could live in Winnipeg a thousand years and not meet Ringo, Paul McCartney, or Bob Dylan.
Burton Cummings
#96. If I was to meet Lou Reed or Bob Dylan, I would be totally helpless. Writers and musicians make me feel completely starstruck.
Toby Stephens
#97. Courtney Love's name should be right next to Bob Dylan when they say best lyricist of all time.
Linda Perry
#98. Well, I met Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan in the space of 15 minutes. Frank Sinatra kissed me on the lips. He kissed me on the lips. And then he gave me a filterless cigarette. And then I met Bob Dylan. I came off all lightheaded and had to go sit on his dressing-room steps.
Kate Moss
#99. I remember Bob Dylan saying in an interview that at a certain point he'd had to learn to do consciously what he'd previously done unconsciously or automatically. That resonates.
Peter Blegvad
#100. Bob Dylan impresses me about as much as ... well, I was gonna say a slug but I like slugs.
Captain Beefheart
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