Bob Dylan Song Quotations

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

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

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.

Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard by this. All my songs have been written by people who went out of fashion years ago. Just like da Vinci and Renoir and van Gogh. Nobody paints like that anymore. But it can't be wrong to try.

I want to use songs that everybody knows or thinks they know. I want to show them a different side of it and open up that world in a more unique way. You have to believe what the words are saying and the words are as important as the melody. Unless you believe the song and have lived it, there's little sense in performing it. I never wanted to be a singer that

People talk about Frank [Sinatra] all the time - and they should talk about Frank - but he had the greatest arrangers. They worked for him in a different kind of way than they worked for other people. They gave him arrangements that are just sublime on every level. And he, of course, could match that because he had this ability to get inside of the song in a sort of a conversational way. Frank sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards.

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.

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.

You travel the world, you go see different things. I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I'll go - I mean, even if it's in a different language. I don't care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I've seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It's like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else, somebody has a great version.

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.

Being singer is different than being an actor, where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you're in. But an actor is pretending to be somebody, a singer isn't. And that's the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there's very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn't leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm good with songs I haven't written, if I like them. I'm glad I didn't write any of them. I already know how they go, so I have more freedom with them. I understand these songs. I've known them for 40 years, 50 years, maybe longer, and they make a lot of sense. So I'm not coming to them like a stranger.

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.

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

And I'll know my song well before I start singing

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.

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

...you could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live ...

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

Down the street the dogs are barking And the day is getting dark. As the night comes in a-falling, The dogs´ll lose their bark And the silent night will shatter From the sounds inside my mind, For I´m one to many mornings And a thousand miles behind. From the crossroads of my doorstep, My eyes they start to fade, As I turn my head back to the room Where my love and I have laid....

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

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

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

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

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)

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probaby, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs. Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

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.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

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

Don't criticize what you can't understand.

It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs. When 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. 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. People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

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

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

Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening.

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

A brilliant 1989 album, Oh Mercy; some career retrospectives; and two albums of American folk songs, with just Bob Dylan and his guitar and harmonica. All that culminated in the Grammy-winning comeback album, Time Out of Mind (1997). Once again, just as Dylan seemed to be out of it, he was back at the top of his game.

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

[Bob] Dylan's broken-heart songs are so much better. Like "Simple Twist of Fate".

The people in my songs are all me.

Bent out of shape from society's pliers, cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the hole that he's in.

After becoming famous once again - a 1976 song, "Hurricane," even marked a return to protest songwriting - [Bob] Dylan got addicted to drugs, found Jesus, left Jesus, and put out a lot of swill.

"Tangled Up in Blue," shifts perspective several times during the song to tell a "tangled" version of [Bob] Dylan's marriage and dissolution.

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.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

"Like a Rolling Stone" [of Bob Dylan] is a kiss-off song like none before or since.

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

There would be brilliant songs, but, as [Bob] Dylan admitted on the recent Martin Scorsese documentary about him (No Direction Home), the specific muse that inspired "It's Alright Ma" would not return.

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 has never written a bad song. Bob Dylan is a genius.

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.

Along with some of the worst music of Bob Dylan's career ("Self-Portrait," 1970), this period produced some gems - including many songs recorded with The Band in '67 but not released until years later.

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.

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.

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

In the meantime [1965-67], [Bob] Dylan was again writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."

He's written extraordinary songs, hasn't he? I consider him one of the preeminent songwriters of the times. Every song he does has a vitality you don't find everywhere.