Nat Hentoff Quotes

I have no doubt that if I met Bob Dylan, it would be disappointing - and annoying to him. But that's why I like Bob Dylan.

Well, I love Bob Dylan, let's make that clear. He's one of my musical heroes.

I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.

I loved working with Bob Dylan.

There are a lot of obligations when you put out a record and it does well. People want to talk to you, which is nice. So then you make sure you do that.

Dave Van Ronk, for those who don't know him - probably most don't know - was a folk singer. He's kind of the biggest person on the scene in 1961 in the folk revival in Greenwich Village, biggest person on the scene until Bob Dylan showed up.

For someone like me, who has grown up with Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, it's hard not to invest a lot of myself in what I do.

I thought he was the greatest thing. Bob Dylan.

If they made a movie about Bob Dylan, I would love to play a young Bob Dylan; I mean, I've got the wild hair.

I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. I'm also a blues geek.

I've always loved Bob Dylan.

I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.

I am a Bob Dylan fan.

Hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you, about a strange young man called Dylan with a voice like sand and glue.

I was like, "Who the hell is Bob Dylan?" I was going to learn one song to appease my mom and alphabetically the first song in the book was "Absolutely Sweet Marie." When I heard it, it was like "Oh, there is something going on here. It's not like my parents' boring music that I don't care about. This is totally electrifying."

I'm also a big Bob Dylan fan. The songs on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan - which is one of his best early albums - they grow out of some of his difficulties with Suze Rotolo, and "Hard Rain," people say it had to do with the Cuban missile crisis - probably not. He denied it. I believe him, but it certainly had to do with the time.

If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

I sang in the coffee houses . . . in the early 60's with no idea of success in terms of records or television. I just thought I was a storyteller. I had this deep, bassy voice. But I had incredible passion for the music I was singing.

I want to be just a musician and songwriter, and hopefully known as a very good one. I love a lot of music that's considered folk music, but I also love a lot of music that's considered punk or considered rap. I don't mind being called a folk singer. But it seems a bit limiting. I want to be able to write whatever kind of song I want.

[Bob] Dylan began to incorporate things into that scene that were controversial then. He got shouted at in Newport when he played electric guitar, for instance. There was a certain purity that was sought among those people.

I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write songs about girls, but it's just hard to do right now.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

So in that way, fame has become a weirder thing to go after, but the thing about me is I've never been after fame. That sounds cliché, but it's true. I think fame sounds uncomfortable to me, but being able to like write this book and make my living doing very exciting, creative stuff sounds really amazing. It has been really amazing.

I was talking to Alan Jackson. He had his second Greatest Hits album. He said, You don't ever get into this really thinking you're gonna make it.