Quote Of The Day By Bob Dylan: 'Happiness Is Not On My List Of Priorities.'

Sometimes it seems like everything Bob Dylan ever said is quote-worthy. Writer of some of the most legendary songs of all time, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, and prolific musician with 125 million albums sold across 40 studio albums, Dylan has come a long way from his childhood in the Minnesota mining town of Hibbing. He's put in the work, walked the walk, sang the songs, and as Rolling Stone quoted him at 50 years old in 1991: "Happiness is not on my list of priorities."

The statement might seem odd considering that happiness is something we'd assume everyone actively pursues. But, Dylan's life illustrates otherwise. As Dylan continued in his conversation with Rolling Stone, "I just deal with day-to-day things. If I'm happy, I'm happy — and if I'm not, I don't know the difference." Workmanship, focusing on the task at hand, staying grounded in everyday realities, going with the flow: As far back as the late '50s and early '60s, Dylan did all this. 

After toting his guitar to local coffee shops to play folk music as a young man, Dylan moved to New York City in 1961 with apparently nowhere to live. He put on shows in Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village and relied on the goodwill of attendees for food and shelter. He got signed to Columbia Records later that year, put out his first album in 1962, and just kept marching all the way to the present, true to his view of happiness. That's why Dylan gets our quote of the day.

"Happiness is not on my list of priorities. I just deal with day-to-day things. If I'm happy, I'm happy — and if I'm not, I don't know the difference," Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1991 when he turned 50 years old. His quote comes from being asked if he was a happier person then, or when he was younger. Dylan first replied, "Oh, man, I've never even thought about that." After a bit of thinking, he continued, "These are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either blessed or unblessed ... Happiness is just a balloon — it's just temporary stuff."

Dylan was already considered a legend at the time of this interview, decades before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. He was, as he told Rolling Stone, blessed, "[b]ut not because I'm a big rock 'n' roll star." He was also not quite at the end of his creative rope and hadn't transformed into a purely legacy act. Some six years later he'd release 1997's "Time Out of Mind," an album that reached No. 10 on the Billboard 200 — his highest-charting album since 1979's "Slow Train Coming," which reached No. 3. In 2020, Dylan would hit No. 1 on a Billboard chart for the first time in his career with "Murder Most Foul." 

Judging by Dylan's attitude in his 1991 interview with Rolling Stone, he didn't plan this return to form. In fact, it doesn't seem like he planned much of anything across his life. He just did as his quote says: He took things as they came and stayed in the moment. If it worked for Dylan, it could work for the rest of us.

Bob Dylan generally uses accessible language to say what he means, in and out of songs; arguably, this is a big reason why he's been so successful. His one-word response to writing "Blowin' in the Wind" in just 10 minutes exemplifies as much. This isn't always the case, though, either in songs ("Visions of Johanna" comes to mind) or in interviews. There's some interpretation to be done when it comes to Dylan's "Happiness is not on my list of priorities" quote, some of which we already touched on earlier. And believe us when we say: Dylan's got a lot of quotes that every true fan will appreciate.

We can take Dylan's aforementioned, early '60s days in New York City to illustrate. What if Dylan had said, "Oh, it's too cold here and I'm too uncomfortable. Forget this whole music thing. I'm going home"? What if he had done anything other than simply book shows, make connections, and chip away at his future life and career? It's not that Dylan is or was unaware of what's going on inside himself, or disregards it; in a 1966 interview with Playboy (on Interferenza), Dylan said directly, "I know what I'm saying. It's very simple in my mind." Rather, Dylan isn't obsessing about his inner state. He knew who he was, what he thought, what he wanted to do, and simply went about doing it, workmanlike. 

In a feelings-obsessed, self-pathologizing internet age, Dylan's outlook ought to cleanse the mind. Unless you're extremely lucky, discomfort is necessary to get anywhere. And if you're Dylan, who said that life was more about being blessed versus unblessed, you just might be lucky and blessed.

• "Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms."
• "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death."
• "A song leaves your mouth just as soon as it leaves your hands."
• "To say 'cause of peace' is just like saying 'hunk of butter.'"
• "I guess you should go where your wants are bare, where you're invisible and not needed."
• "Nobody's going to care if you rhyme 'represent' with 'ferment,' you know."
• "So the best kinds of songs you can write are in motel rooms and cars."