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"a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet"
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Bob Dylan"I defy you to say what hell be doing six months from now. Hes just driven by pure art. You know, his son said to me..."There is no doubt that if my dad had never made it, if he was sitting on the side of the sidewalk with his guitar and a hat out in front of him, he would be doing precisely doing the same songs. His whole career would be exactly the same." Now, there is certainly hyperbole in that, but its kind of, sort of true... If we have anybody whos Shakespeare in our time, its Dylan, and he just speaks to me more and more, and he once said in an interview that the purpose of art was to inspire, and when you see a Dylan show...You would think hes so good, you know—if you go see a jazz cat whos so good playing bass, you can leave that show going, "Why even pick up a bass again?" But for some reason—and Im not the only one that feels this—at the end of the Dylan show, art just seems so good. I want to go write a play, or write a novel. Ill stay up all night and write a song. And you dont care that its not as good. The other thing that I love about Dylan is he is a freak, not a cheerleader... Dylan just stands there and says, "I am speaking for me. Maybe some of this is true for you to. I dont know. But Im digging so deep." All of his mining, you know, is going towards his heart and deeper into his brain. He makes no attempt, that I can tell, to say, "Oh yeah, this is gonna kill em. This is what theyll like." And thats where universality has to live. You cant be universal if youre trying to please other people. You can only be universal if you have so clearly who you are, and Dylan has no idea who he is, but hes still searching and hes sharing that process with us."
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. Described as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 69-year career. With an estimated 125 million records sold worldwide, he is one of the best-selling musicians. Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it "with the intellectua
"a poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet"
"Hes a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. Hes a real person. You know him, but not by that name... I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "Thats Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesnt he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." Its all there, its a true story."
"Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb."
"Twenty years of schoolin And they put you on the day shift"
"I said, "You know they refused Jesus, too" He said, "Youre not Him"
"I am a writer an a singer of the words I write I am no speaker nor any politician an my songs speak for me because I write them in the confinement of my own mind an have t cope with no one except my own self."
"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."
"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."
"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."
"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."
"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."
"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."