"I had no answers to any of those questions any more than any other performer did, really. But, you know, that didn't stop the press or people or whoever they were from asking these questions. They, for some reason the press thought that performers had the answers to all these problems in the society and you know, like what can... What can you say to something like that? I mean, it's just kind of absurd."

"You can't be wise and in love at the same time."

"You don't need my autograph. If you needed it, I'd give it to you."

"An artist has gotta be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he's at somewhere. You always have to realize that you're constantly in a state of becoming."

"I didn't go to classes. I just didn't feel like it."

"I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere... set out to find... this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?"

"We may not be able to defeat these swine, but we don't have to join them."

"Bob Dylan: The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think of to write that you don't see every day in a newspaper or on television? Interviewer: ...Do you think that TV and the media have killed poetry and literature? Bob Dylan: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. ... What's a writer to do if every idea is exposed in the media before he can get to it or let it evolve? What's a writer gonna write about? ... We're living in a science-fiction world. We're living in a world that Disney has conquered. Disney's science fiction. Theme parks, trendy streets, it's all science fiction. So I would say, if a writer has got something to say, he'll have to do it in that– Interviewer: Outside of the real world? Bob Dylan: There is a real world. Science fiction has become the real world. Whether we realize it or not, it has."

"I'm inconsistent, even to myself."

"I change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It doesn't even matter to me."

"Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else."

"That ear - I mean, Jesus, he's got to will that to the Smithsonian."

"People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around — the music and the ideas."

"My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is... Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway."

"It's not to anybody's best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run."

"The first two lines, which rhymed 'kiddin' you' and 'didn't you,' just about knocked me out, and later on, when I got to the jugglers and the chrome horse and the princess on the steeple, it all just about got to be too much."

"When I first heard Elvis's voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock and roll religion as it exists in today's form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. I think for a long time that freedom to me was Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.' I thank God for Elvis."

"I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet. Anybody who could possibly call himself a poet just cannot be a poet."

"If the songs are dreamed, it's like my voice is coming out of their dream."

"I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom."

"Chaos is a friend of mine."

"At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don't know. Lately if I read poems, it's like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare's sonnets I can hear a melody because it's all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, 'What kind of song would this be?'"

"I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing."

"I think women rule the world, and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn't allowed him to do or encouraged him to do."

"I kinda live where I find myself."

"Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?"

"I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet."

"Ron Rosenbaum: Why are you doing what you're doing? Bob Dylan: [Pause] Because I don't know anything else to do. I'm good at it. Ron Rosenbaum: How would you describe "it"? Bob Dylan: I'm an artist. I try to create art."

"Greed and lust I can understand, but I can't understand the values of definition and confinement. Definition destroys. Besides, there's nothing definite in this world."

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

"I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don't believe that any more. There's myself and there's my song, which I hope is everybody's song."

"You have to be let alone to really accomplish anything."

"God, I'm glad I'm not me."

"Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb."

"I don't believe you! You're a liar! ... Play it fucking loud!"

"Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges."

"Bob Dylan: I do know what my songs are about. Playboy: And what's that? Bob Dylan: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve."

"Reporter: How many people who labor in the same musical vineyard in which you toil - how many are protest singers? That is, people who use their music, and use the songs to protest the, uh, social state in which we live today: the matter of war, the matter of crime, or whatever it might be. Bob Dylan: Um...how many? Reporter: Yes. How many? Bob Dylan: Uh, I think there's about, uh...136. Reporter: You say about 136, or you mean exactly 136? Bob Dylan: Uh, it's either 136 or 142."

"I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know there are some people terrified of the bomb, but there are others terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine. Experience teaches that silence terrifies the most."

"I find it easy to write songs. I been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren't written out just for the paper; they're written as you can read it, you dig. If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can't do that with either—songs that, if you took the beat and the melody away, they wouldn't stand up because they're not supposed to do that, you know. Songs are songs."

"You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist."

"He's a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story."

"a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet"

"do Not create anything, it will be misinterpreted. it will not change. it will follow you the rest of your life."

"I am a writer an a singer of the words I write I am no speaker nor any politician an my songs speak for me because I write them in the confinement of my own mind an have t cope with no one except my own self."

"There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt."

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

"Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind."