Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
They say the first thing to go is your legs, then it's your reflexes, then it's your friends.
Just remember that William Blake wasn't even published in his lifetime. Ya gotta keep creating.
Look at me! I can go from 'Donny and Marie' to Sam Peckinpah to Radio City Music Hall in one week.
I watched Dylan record 'Blonde On Blonde' in my first week at work at CBS. It was just incredible.
I did co-write 'Moment of Forever' with Danny Timms. He wrote the melody, and I just did the words.
Jesus was a Capricorn, he ate organic foods, he believed in love and peace, and never wore no shoes.
I've been writing songs since I was a little boy. You know, I think I wrote my first song when I was 11.
Havin' Dylan cover one of your songs is like being a playwright and having Shakespeare act in your play.
Bobby McGee' was the song that made the difference for me. Every time I sing it, I still think of Janis.
There are points in your life, especially if you have creative ambitions, where selfishness is necessary.
I've been a radical for a long time. I guess it's too bad. I'd be more marketable as a right-wing redneck.
I ended up being friends with all my heroes. Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Johnny Cash - it was incredible.
The most valuable thing to me seems to be time, and with time, I can be great. I have been... and I will be.
You don't paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.
I can interpret my own work honestly. And performing by myself seems to focus the attention in the right places.
Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end.
I am grateful every morning I wake up. I've a big family full of kids, who laugh all the time and love each other.
I wish my memory weren't so bad. They tell me it's from all the football and boxing and the concussions that I got.
I don't think I've gotten any smarter, but your reflexes slow down before you do something stupid when you're older.
The world he saw was sadder than the one he hoped to find. But it wasn't near as lonesome as the one he left behind.
I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, so arriving in Nashville in the '60s was really exciting for me.
Dylan's relationship with Johnny Cash was the biggest influence on Nashville in my lifetime - they opened up country music.
As far as fame, the everlasting fame thing. I used to think that was important for a writer... the desire to make your mark.
When I was thirty, and a long time after that, I felt like I had to leave home to do what I had to do. Now, it's just the opposite.
Human rights is something that wasn't hard to be inspired to write about because there have been so many violations of those rights.
If 'Bobby McGee' lasts, if 'Star Is Born' lasts, if 'Help Me Make It through the Night' lasts, if all of 'em last, man... who cares?
Everything that I write is sort of autobiographical, and I don't know that I'm getting better, but I'm certainly running out of time.
If it hadn't been for Johnny Cash, I'd probably have been a Nashville songwriter because that's what I had done for almost five years.
The number-one rule of the road is never go to bed with anyone crazier than yourself. You will break this rule, and you will be sorry.
To do the things that I did, I'm amazed that I had the audacity - like resigning from the Army and becoming a janitor and a songwriter.
The closest Ive come to knowing myself is in losing myself. Thats why I loved football before I loved music. I could lose myself in it.
I don't think I'm that good a singer. I can't think of a song that I've written that I don't like the way somebody else sings it better.
The closest I've come to knowing myself is in losing myself. That's why I loved football before I loved music. I could lose myself in it.
When I wrote 'Help Me Make It Through the Night,' I was on an oil platform out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and was just thinking of myself.
It's much better being an older father. You don't have to go prove to the world and to yourself that you're who you want to be, for better or worse.
There was a film that really affected me, 'La Strada' by Fellini, where Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina travel around on his little motorcycle thing.
I've had a life of all kinds of experiences - most of them good. And I've got eight kids and a wife that puts up with everything I do and keeps me out of trouble.
I had a list of rules I made up one time. It says: Tell the truth, sing with passion, work with laughter, and love with heart. Those are good to start with, anyway.
I have no regrets. I feel very grateful for the life that I had - you know, family I live with; and I've been doing work that I love, ever since I came to Nashville.
Never's just the echo of forever, lonesome as a love that might have been. Let me go on lovin' and believin' 'til it's over. Please don't tell me how the story ends.
To me, the best love songs work on two - maybe three - different levels, where you're talking about the person who you're right opposite, and all the people like that.
I've been trying to think of things to tell my kids, something that I could pass down, and it's like, gee whiz, I maybe never learned anything that didn't contradict itself.
There was time in the first half of the '80s when what I was saying on the stage was controversial. A lot of things I was talking about - Nicaragua and American foreign policy.
Right after I resigned from the Army in 1965, I flew helicopters for oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. I flew personnel from rig to rig, and I'd live on a platform out at sea.
I used to think that my songs were the best things that I would leave behind me. And I definitely think my kids are now. For starters, they're writing better songs than I was at their age.
I turned 30 as a janitor. I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time.
I think it's kind of odd that 'This Old Road' was the first video I ever did. Because of all of the work I had done in films and everything, you'd think I would have done a video before that.
Gordon Lightfoot has created some of the most beautiful and lasting music of our time. He is Bob Dylan's favorite singer/songwriter - high praise from the best of us, applauded by the rest of us.
There were decades I didn't play sober. I thought, Who would want to? But at some point, I decided that if it was important enough to me to keep doing it as art, I should do it with all my tools.
Johnny Cash was the champion of the voiceless, the underdogs and the downtrodden. He was also something of a holy terror, like Abraham Lincoln with a wild side. He represented the best of America.