I don't find him that a dick at present, as far as I can determine from a vastly mediated distance. The interviews he gives now, at least, are more straightforward and generous-spirited than they've ever been. But if you don't like his stage-patterless perormances, you may find him dickish. That said, he seems to have been at least kind of a fun guy, even if ruthlessly ambitious, back in the Greenwich Village days. When he became the Voice of His Generation, the unprecedented burden of expectations placed on him so far exceeded anything you or I can imagine that I can't quite begrudge him a little character damage. After the motorcycle accident he seems to have become a more humble fellow and dedicated family man. Of course, eventually, his music began to suffer from too much unassuming niceness. Then he appears to have become something of a dick again, went through an ugly divorce (much of the ugliness, it must be said, apparently coming from his end) and, in my view, he achieved his absolute apex of insufferable dickishness starting with the Rolling Thunder era, moving through his Neil Diamond period and on through the Christian period. Then he spent most of the 80's not knowing which the fuck end was up. I don't have much sense of how dickish he was personally at this point, but he was definitely lost, doing a LOT of drinking, and behaving eccentrically.
My sense is that from the mid-90s up to now he's learned how to deal maturely with his fame in a way that's pretty admirable, given the odds against it when you look at comparable cases, but again, what the hell do I know? Only what I read in the papers.