Skip to content

Music Quotes by Bob Dylan

67 Music quotes by Bob Dylan

All Music quotes Bob Dylan’s page

Bob Dylan calls himself a poet first and a musician second, saying he lives and will die like a poet. He warns that music can be a salvation but also a kind of pollution when it’s used only for profit. One quote notes that his best songs were written very quickly, almost as fast as he could write them down.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Play it fuckin' loud!

Image

“Be groovy or leave, man”

Image

I do know what my songs are about.

Image

The people in my songs are all me.

Image

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Image

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

Image

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

Image

I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.

Image

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

Image

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

Image

And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.

Image

The Harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.

Image

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

Image

Music attracts the angels in the universe.

Image

If you ever tell anyone about Jonah's sexual dysfunction, I'll never play music again.

Image

I just don't hear anyone else making the music I'm making in my head, so I'll have to do it myself.

Image

In songs, you have to tell people about something they didn't see and weren't there for, and you have to do it…

Image

Music can save people, but it can't in the commercial way it's being used. It's just too much. It's pollution.

Image

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

Image

... When it came time to hire a guitar player ... I didn't even have to think about it ... Mike Bloomfield…

Image

“When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”

Image

..When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first…

Image

Popular music had never had lyrical sophistication of this type [like Bob Dylan]; wit, to be sure, but "Darkness at the break…

Image

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it…

Image

Technology is mechanical and contrary to the emotions that inform a person's life. The country music field has especially been hit hard…

Image

Having hits buries a singer in the past. A lot of singers hide in the past because it's safer back there. If…

Image

I need all kinds of songs - fast ones, slow ones, minor key, ballads, rumbas - and they all get juggled around…

Image

“..And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of…

Image

Aretha with no goals, eternally single & one step soft of heaven/ let it be understood that she owns this melody along…

Image

I like the fans, but I don't feel an obligation that I have to be an example to them, like say maybe…

Image

We're constantly being bombarded by insulting and humiliating music, which people are making for you the way they make those Wonder Bread…

Image

“I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my…

Image

I want to use songs that everybody knows or thinks they know. I want to show them a different side of it…

Image

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as…

Image

“songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality.…

Image

“I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs…

Image

The purpose of music is to elevate the spirit and inspire. Not to help push some product down your throat. It puts…

Image

“Q: Is it still possible nowadays to influence the world by songs? To be political by means of messages? A: No, there…

Image

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

Image

I'm not a playwright. The people in my songs are all me.

Image

Other authors on Music

More by Bob Dylan

The hollow horn plays wasted words, proves to warn that he not busy being born is busy dying.

Don't forget to support your public library.

You don't count the dead, when god's on your side.

She makes love just like a woman.

Silvio, I gotta go, find out something only dead men know.

I don't really have a retirement plan.

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…

Little red wagon, little red bike, I ain’t no monkey but I know what I like.

Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift - look out out kid, they keep it all hid

The drunken politician leaps upon the street where mothers weep, and the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you.

Your eyes are like two jewels in the sky.

I gotta friend who spends his life, stabbing my picture with a bowie knife. Dreams of strangling me with a scarf, when my name…

She speaks with a stutter and she and she walks with a hop. I don't know why I love her, but I just can't…

The man in the coon skin cap in the pig pen wants eleven dollar bills, you've only got ten.

Don't put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist.