Bob Dylan on Mind

"It's not to anybody's best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run."

"Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language."

"Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, they're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made"

"It's sundown on the union that was made in the USA. Sure was a good idea till greed got in the way."

"Counterfeit philosophies have polluted all of your thoughts; Karl Marx has got you by the throat, and Henry Kissinger's got you tied up into knots."

"I've been deceived by the clown inside of me. I thought that he was righteous but he's vain."

"Whatever colors you have in your mind. I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine."

"If I thought about it, I never would have done it, I guess I would have let it slide."

"And I'll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it."

"There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt."

"At certain times I read a lot of poetry. My favorite poets are Shelley and Keats. Rimbaud is so identifiable. Lord Byron. I don't know. Lately if I read poems, it's like I can always hear the guitar. Even with Shakespeare's sonnets I can hear a melody because it's all broken up into timed phrases so I hear it. I always keep thinking, 'What kind of song would this be?'"

"My sense of rhyme used to be more involved in my songwriting than it is... Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway."

"I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"