If I made records for my own pleasure, I would only record Charley Patton songs.

The people in my songs are all me.

Bent out of shape from society's pliers, cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the hole that he's in.

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

Well, the moral of the story, The moral of this song, Is simply that one should never be Where one does not belong. So when you see your neighbor carryin' somethin', Help him with his load, And don't go mistaking Paradise For that home across the road.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

After becoming famous once again - a 1976 song, "Hurricane," even marked a return to protest songwriting - [Bob] Dylan got addicted to drugs, found Jesus, left Jesus, and put out a lot of swill.

"Tangled Up in Blue," shifts perspective several times during the song to tell a "tangled" version of [Bob] Dylan's marriage and dissolution.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.