I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

— Bob Dylan

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 there's some kind of change.

— Bob Dylan

I failed to communicate, that's why I chose to leave

— Bob Dylan

If you're looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came. Because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same.

— Bob Dylan

If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

— Bob Dylan

I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers wasn't for audiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial. Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Goal Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic." Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window, and you had to have awkward footwear to walk on it. I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the untruth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.

— Bob Dylan

I had no time for romance. I turned away from the window, from the wintry sun, crossed through the room, went to the stove and made and poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and then clicked on the radio

— Bob Dylan

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours

— Bob Dylan

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

— Bob Dylan

I’m happy to just be able to come across things. I don’t need to be happy. Happiness is a kind of cheap word. Let’s face it, I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something. I would commit suicide. I would shoot myself in the brain if things got bad. Furthermore, I would jump from a window…you know, I can think about death openly. It’s nothing to fear. It’s nothing sacred. I’ve seen so many people die. Life’s not sacred either

— Bob Dylan