"A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter."
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Quote collection
Bob Dylan quotes (page 43 of 44)
872 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to be vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose. I don't have anything but darkness to lose."
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"I didn't come out of a cereal box."
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"If I made records for my own pleasure, I would only record Charley Patton songs."
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"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."
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"God bless them pretty women, I wish they was mine, Their breath is as sweet, The dew on the vine."
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"How many times have you heard someone say If I had his money I'd do things my way Hmm, but little they know Hmm, it's so hard to find One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind."
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"Feel like a broke-down engine, ain't got no drivin' wheel. You all been down and lonesome, you know just how a poor man feels."
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"Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road"
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"And I'll know my song well before I start singing"
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"The atom bomb fueled the entire world that came after it. It showed that indiscriminate killing and indiscriminate homicide on a mass level was possible ... whereas if you look at warfare up until that point, you had to see somebody to shoot them or maim them, you had to look at them. You don't have to do that anymore."
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"Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you."
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"Rumble is the best instrumental ever."
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"Up north, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials that played pre-rock 'n' roll things - country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin' Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn't even know where Alabama was."
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"Sometimes you get out from behind the wheel and let someone else step on the gas."
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"We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, "My character this, and my character that." Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me."
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"Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radio/record player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing."
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"Every singer has three or four or five techniques, and you can force them together in different combinations. Some of the techniques you discard along the way, and pick up others. But you do need them. It's just like anything. You have to know certain things about what you're doing that other people don't know. Singing has to do with techniques and how many you use at the same time. One alone doesn't work. There's no point to going over three. But you might interchange them whenever you feel like it. It's a bit like alchemy."
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"I think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop."
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"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.""
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