Bob Dylan

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that’s going on right now in a big way.

Don’t matter how much money you got, there’s only two kinds of people: there’s saved people and there’s lost people.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

Applause felt like approval and it became a drug that soothed the pain, but only temporarily.

It’s important to reflect on what made Jazz so special.

I sing like I feel.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

I cannot play a lie. I have to believe in what I play or it won’t come out.

I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

Without jazz, life would be a mistake.

You can’t listen to what people who aren’t musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don’t want to hear, ‘Your kid is ugly.’ But I knew the record was good and it would sell.

People involve themselves with the superficiality of Jazz without digging for its soul.