Bob Dylan

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I’m not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I’ve never thought about that before! He said, When you’re not following me, you’re resisting me.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

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

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

For them that think death’s honesty won’t fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

As long as you’ve got your horn in your mouth, you’re developing.

If you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

And ultimately the people who produce my records, they know that they’re here to serve the purpose of me expressing who I am at this period of time and augmenting that or pulling it forward and I love that process.

When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

Listening is more important than anything because that’s what music is. Somebody is playing something and you’re receiving it.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.

I’ve noticed that the more adventurous and in that mode that I am, it seems that the more the audience really likes it.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

Jimmy (Wakely) told me, ‘I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, ‘How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.