Bob Dylan The Essential Interviews
edited by Jonathan Cott
2006, hardcover
35 cards
Quotes from Bob Dylan's interviews reminded me of Andy Warhol's approach to the interview, playing with it and making it into something greater than it started. While there are a lot of interviews to read here one sees how true Dylan stays to his approach to meaning what he says and saying what he means both with interviewers who get it and those who do not.
Select lines:
ix- "To live is to be slowly born." Antonine de saint- Exupery, Flight to Arras
23- "I looked around and saw all the people pointing fingers at the bomb. But the bomb is getting boring, because what's wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. What's wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesn't let them really speak."
24- "All I can do it be myself. I can't tell them how to change things, because there's only one way to change things, and that's to cut yourself off from all the chains. That's hard for most people to do."
25- "Just because you're free to move doesn't mean you're free."
38- "songs are songs...I don't believe in expecting too much out of any one thing."
44- "There aren't any answers, man. Or any questions..."
45- French guy, unpaginated book in a box
48- "Most people who don't like rock and roll can't relate to other people."
49- "You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist."
51- collecting
53- "You gotta listen to the Staples Sisters, Smokey and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas. That's scary to a lot of people. It's sex that's involved. It's not hidden. It's real."
54- "Great paintings shouldn't be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men's rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out."
-"Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner."
58- "If it happens, it happens. Whatever my hopes, it never turns out."
84- "Happiness is a kind of cheap word."
86- "Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world had just gone on."
"I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet."
96- "Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms, everybody knows that."
101- "My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing- only as seen inside a bigger thing."
104- "You can't lost what you never had."
106- "People have one great blessing- obscurity- and not really too many people are thankful for it."
108- "There doesn't seem to be any tomorrow. Every time I wake up, not matter in what position, it's always been today."
116- "No, I think it was Ben Franklin. He said (I'm not quoting it right) something like, 'For a man to be (something or other)- at east, he must not tell all he knows, nor say all he sees.'"
128- "You know, you might sometimes be with someone who's got no song to sing, and I believe you can help someone out..."
175- "The highest purpose of art is to inspire."
206- "But, you know, sometimes you get too close to something and you got to get away from it to be able to see it."
215 "...I see beauty where other people don't."
218 (truths) "One is that if you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure."
220- "Art is supposed to take you out of your chair. It's supposed to move you from one space to another."
228- "People are people to me."
229- hearts beating in the same rhythm
232- "The only true mirrors are puddles of water."
235- "Uncompromising, that's what makes a good artist."
248- "The simple things which are true usually astound people."
259- "Everybody sees in the mirror what he sees- no two people see the same thing."
262- (soul mates existing) "Sure they do, but sometimes you never meet them."
-"Your real feelings come out when you're free to be alone."
298- "Protest is anything that goes against the ordinary and the established."
299- "I never really like The Basement Tapes..."
300- "People need a leader more than a leader needs people, really."
306- "I'm always in love." (Jeff Tweedy read this interview)
312- "So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cause nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing."
336- "Never give 100 percent"
400- "It's anything you want it to be."
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