Italian singer-songwriter Francesco De Gregori said of Bob Dylan's Nobel prize for literature Thursday that "it's news that fills me with joy, I'd like to say that it's never too late." De Gregori, who recently issued the album 'De Gregori Sings Bob Dylan - Love and Theft', said "the Nobel awarded to Dylan is not just an award for the greatest songwriter of all time but also the definitive recognition that songs are an integral part of today's literature and can recount, on a par with literature, cinema and theatre, the world and the stories of men". De Gregori said "Bob Dylan personifies the essence of all this, no one has been able to put into music and words like he has the epic of existence, its contradictions, its beauty". He said that "in Dylan's high and pure gaze there is reality." De Gregori, on this year's Love and Theft tour, sang 11 reworked Dylan songs. Dylan has described De Gregori, 65, as a"folk Italian hero".
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