Quotes by Michael Stipe - Page 2

Be yourself. Follow your heart. I know it sounds obvious, but it's the best advice at anyone ever. Take advice from other people, but take from it what feels right for you.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Being Yourself
Heart
People
Copy Quote
I am not an autobiographical writer. I'll take little elements here and there from things that I've actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Example
Eyelashes
Sleep
Copy Quote
By nature I will find hope in everything. Even if it's the most incredibly hopeless situation or circumstance. That's just me... I'll never be able to see things any other way.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Hope
Able
Way
Copy Quote
For me, as a music fan, visuals kind of steal away the purity of the song. My instinct is not to provide a visual to go with a piece of music. But here's MTV. It's really powerful.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Mtv
Powerful
Song
Copy Quote
There are people that very strongly identify themselves as gay and then lesbian, and then I think there are a lot of people who are kind of some percentage or some version of that.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Gay
People
Thinking
Version
Identify
Lesbian
Percentage
Strongly
Copy Quote
I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Collaboration
Guy
Trying
Copy Quote
I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Difficult Times
Mind
Records
Copy Quote
Super casual music listeners. That's most of the people in the world. And you have to understand, that's why Top 40 radio exists. It's not there for people who seek out music and who love music.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Casual
Listeners
People
Radio
World
Love Music World
Exists
Seek
Super
Copy Quote
You don't need to be talented. You don't even have to play the guitar to be a guitar player in a punk-rock band. So I, in a very naïve and teenage way, said, "That's it. I'm going to be in a band."
Michael Stipe / Singer
Player
Rocks
Teenage
Copy Quote
When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Joy
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we're kind of an international phenomenon.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Athens
Band
Coast
East
East Coast
Georgia
International
Phenomenon
Southern
Copy Quote
Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Care
Casual
Easy
Listeners
Radio
Copy Quote
There was a point in the '80s when I looked out at my audience and I saw people that - were I not on the stage - they'd sooner slug me as they walked by me on the sidewalk. And I realized that I was way beyond the choir.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Audience
Choir
People
Saws
Sidewalk
Stage
Way
Me People Way
Beyond
Sooner
Looked
Realized
Slug
Walked
Copy Quote
[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.
Michael Stipe / Singer
New York
Horse
House
Order
Copy Quote
We made part of the record in Miami, and I would go down to the beach, and not 20 feet from the water I see a fish that is at least seven feet long swimming close to the shore. I did not go back in the ocean the entire month.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Ocean
Beach
Feet
Miami
Seven
Shore
Swimming
Water
Month
Fish
Close
Entire
Record
Copy Quote
But we're very much an American band and that's that. I think that's part of the appeal outside of this country and it might be part of the reason people turned away from us within this country, because familiarity breeds contempt.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Band
Contempt
Familiarity
Breeds
People Country American
Appeal
Familiarity Breeds
Copy Quote
At the [teenage] time, I did have an inkling of my sexuality. And I had an inkling that I was different from other people in ways beyond my sexuality. But I didn't get into music because I thought, Oh, these people will understand me.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Different
People
Teenage
Copy Quote
AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the '80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Responsibility
Sex
Sleep
Copy Quote
When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Eye
Fans
Voice
Copy Quote
So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Beauty
Athens
East
East Village
San Francisco
Scene
Village
Francisco
Just Kind
Map
San
Copy Quote
But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we're very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Best Work
Certain
Consistent
Desire
Laurels
Thinking
Allow
Certain Things
Rest
Formula
The One Thing
Copy Quote
We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Years Ago
Respond
Country People American
Popular
Copy Quote
There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Character
Song
Writing
Copy Quote
So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it's wallpaper to them, it's elevator music, it's just the thing that's playing in the background that helps them through their day.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Casual
Fans
Lovers
Music Fans
People
World
Music World Day
Background
Divide
Elevator
Helps
Wallpaper
Copy Quote
Punk-rock records came out and you bought whatever you could find. But Devo didn't happen for another three years. Sex Pistols didn't tour the States until '78. At that time, for me, it was really about CBGB, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Television.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Cbgb
Rocks
Sex
Copy Quote
I started lip-synching with "Losing My Religion." There were a few horrendous mistakes we made, but I own those mistakes. I'm embarrassed by them. I always say when I look back at anything I've ever done, it's with equal dollops of humiliation and triumphant glory.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Done
Looks
Mistake
Copy Quote
By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.
Michael Stipe / Singer
America
Dark
Sexy
Copy Quote
I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt [Cobain] out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn't come out and wouldn't answer the phone.
Michael Stipe / Singer
House
Phones
Wall
Copy Quote
It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Art
Black And White
Rocks
Copy Quote
I distinctly remember a conversation with my band in the van where I was having a complete meltdown. It was 1984, I think, and I was huddled in the back corner of our van and saying, "I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this." I didn't want to play any more shows. I just wanted to stop.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Band
Play
Thinking
Copy Quote
I knew [Kurt Cobain] and his daughter. And Courtney [Love] came and stayed at my house. R.E.M. worked on two records in Seattle and Peter Buck lived next door to Kurt and Courtney. So we all knew each other. I reached out to him with that project as an attempt to prevent what was going to happen.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Daughter
Doors
House
Two
Copy Quote
I stopped taking drugs [in 1983]. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn't cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, "That's it," so I quit then. It was horrible.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Car
Morning
Drug
Copy Quote
I've never written a song that's hopeless. I'm not a hopeless person. I'm crazily optimistic. I crazily see the good in people. I crazily see the way out of a terrible situation. I crazily try to be the diplomat. If there are two warring factions in my life, I want them to agree to disagree at the very least.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Optimistic
People
Song
Two
Copy Quote
The artwork for the record is kind of an homage to that. It's a collage, which rhymes with homage, I just realized. It's an homage to this kind of almost like a teenager's idea of what the future might look like, if he were using a Xerox machine and cut-and-pasting it together. Which is exactly what we did to come up with the artwork.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Kind
Rhyme
Together
Copy Quote
I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Real
Sex
Teenager
Copy Quote
I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It's where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira's band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Jealous
New York
Cowboy
Play
Copy Quote
There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape; it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Believe
Spiritual
Two
Copy Quote
Once I reached my 40s, I thought to myself that if I'm going to play live now, I need to really mean this. I can't go out and be a little bit, for one moment slovenly in my choices as a performer. I mean, these people have paid a lot of money to be here, they've been through the nightmare of getting here, starving themselves waiting for us to get on stage, so I'm going to give them what they came here for.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Giving
Mean
People
Copy Quote
I had to get a driver's license and drive to St. Louis to find the punk-rock scene that was happening there. And there was a punk-rock scene. It was sweet. It was real. It was like everywhere else in the county. It was a handful of people who were feeling the same pull, and, of course, it was like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer [1964]. Just the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the unbelievable eccentrics .
Michael Stipe / Singer
Girl
Real
Sweet
Copy Quote
By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?"
Michael Stipe / Singer
Baby
Gay
Sex
Copy Quote
When we signed with Warner Bros., they knew what they were getting. They knew they weren't going to get some easily manipulated prepackaged pop group. That was not going to happen. What they wanted, I think, was the integrity that we had to offer. What they wanted was the kind of street cred or cache that R.E.M. could bring to them and the chance that we would give them a hit or two. What happened was we gave them a bunch of hits. And we became huge.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Integrity
Thinking
Two
Copy Quote
I was vegetarian, trying to eat from fast-food restaurants without meat. I didn't know how to eat properly and I was starving. I was adrenalized to the eyeballs from performing. I was afraid that I was sick with AIDS. We were playing five shows a week. I even went through a period of abstinence where I didn't drink and stopped having sex. Which is crazy. Maybe I'm answering too many questions at once here, but this is where my mind was at the age of 25.
Michael Stipe / Singer
Crazy
Sex
Sick
Copy Quote

Related Singer Authors

Zazie
Singer
Saturday, Apr 18, 1964
Yuya Matsushita
Singer
Thursday, May 24, 1990
Yunho
Singer
Thursday, Feb 06, 1986
Youssou N'dour
Singer
Thursday, Oct 01, 1959
Youngjae
Singer
Monday, Jan 24, 1994
Young Mc
Singer
Wednesday, May 10, 1967
Yoseob
Singer
Friday, Jan 05, 1990
Yoon Mi-Rae
Singer
Sunday, May 31, 1981
Yolanda Adams
Singer
Sunday, Aug 27, 1961
Yesung
Singer
Friday, Aug 24, 1984
Yara
Singer
Wednesday, Jun 01, 1983
Yannis Philippakis
Singer
Wednesday, Apr 23, 1986
Yang Hyun-Suk
Singer
Tuesday, Dec 02, 1969
Wynonna Judd
Singer
Saturday, May 30, 1964
Willow Smith
Singer
Tuesday, Oct 31, 2000

View All Singer Quotes

Top Authors

Vincent Van Gogh
Painter
Wednesday, Mar 30, 1853
Tuesday, Jul 29, 1890
Helen Keller
Author
Sunday, Jun 27, 1880
Saturday, Jun 01, 1968
Mahatma Gandhi
Civil Rights Leader
Saturday, Oct 02, 1869
Friday, Jan 30, 1948
Paulo Coelho
Lyricist
Sunday, Aug 24, 1947
John Keats
Poet
Saturday, Oct 31, 1795
Friday, Feb 23, 1821
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father Of The United States
Sunday, Jan 17, 1706
Saturday, Apr 17, 1790
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essayist
Wednesday, May 25, 1803
Thursday, Apr 27, 1882
Stephen Hawking
Physicist
Thursday, Jan 08, 1942
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Writer
Thursday, Aug 28, 1749
Thursday, Mar 22, 1832
Steven Wright
Comedian
Tuesday, Dec 06, 1955
Pope John Paul Ii
Priest
Tuesday, May 18, 1920
Saturday, Apr 02, 2005
Henry Ford
Industrialist
Thursday, Jul 30, 1863
Monday, Apr 07, 1947
Elon Musk
Investor
Monday, Jun 28, 1971
Dr. Seuss
Writer
Wednesday, Mar 02, 1904
Tuesday, Sep 24, 1991
Leonardo Da Vinci
Painter
Thursday, Apr 15, 1452
Friday, May 02, 1519

View All Authors

Michael Stipe Quotes - Page 2

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Singer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Singer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page