Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.
I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
I still can't manage to keep a journal, and people have been telling me to since the fourth grade.
I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.
May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.
Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.
I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.
I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.
I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.
The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.
I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality.
As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like.
I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.
Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.
I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.
You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.
Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.
When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.
I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, 'Well, here's what I've been doing.' And that would be it.
To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.
As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.
One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.
I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about.
I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.
Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.
I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.
Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.
I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.
There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.
I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now.
I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.
I think 'The Sunset Tree' is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.
I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me.
I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.
I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn't know how to change the strings.
The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.
Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.
A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?
When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.
Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.
To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.
The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.
People want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don't really like to focus too much on myself.