Bob Dylan Quotes

I'm a writer. I write not only for a living, I write because I'm a writer.

Other people get into occupations by accident or design; but writers are born. I could work at selling motels, or slopping hogs, for fifty years, but if someone asked my occupation, I'd say writer, even if I'd never sold a word. Writers write. Other people talk.

I never wanted to be a professional artist; I think that's limiting.

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.

My parents, they were good, godly people, but they never said, You need to write.

I read, with a kind of hopeless envy, histories and legends of people of our craft who "do not write for money." It must be a pleasant experience to be able to cultivate so delicate a class of motives for the privilege of doing one's best to express one's thoughts to people who care for them. Personally, I have yet to breathe the ether of such a transcendent sphere. I am proud to say that I have always been a working woman, and always had to be.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

I wasn't sure I was an artist, so I thought maybe I just was throwing ideas out for people to consider.

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

I always find it fascinating to ask people, why they've chosen to live their life as an artist? Why be an actor, a singer, an author, a filmmaker? I've heard such inspiring answers to that question.

People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn't sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they're brilliant at writing jokes, and I'm not.

I wanted to be an artist, because it's a much better scam than being an architect.

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.

The best thing about being an artist, instead of a madman or someone who writes letters to the editor, is that you get to engage in satisfying work. Even if you never publish a word, you have something important to pour yourself into.

Writing is not "the establishment of a professional reputation" as if one were a doctor or lawyer; it is not properly in the sentence with creation of a family and the purchase of a home.

The life of the artist should be distinguished from that of all other people, even in external habits. They are Brahmins, a higher caste, not ennobled by birth, however, but through deliberate self-initiation.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

I'm not sure that an art career would have any benefit for me; I'm not sure it's what I want. I don't think I want to be a designer-rock artist.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

I believe that if you're an artist, it's like a gift. If you can do this for a living and you can be involved in it, it's something that you can't ignore. It's the chance for you to have a voice and create something from yourself.

How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows.