Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
She touches me The jungle lights up with incinerating fire Looks like a flaming serpent I look into her eyes I see a movie flickering Car crashes People kicking corpses Men ripping their tracheas out and shaking them at the sky I think to myself: I don’t want to survive this one I want to burn up in the wreckage Cooking flesh in the jungle
I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted.
Also, because people like to multitask, in a way if you've got a bit of music on in the background and the lyrical content is making you want to listen to it, then that would probably put you off the texting you wanted to do. I think people like things that just make that right kind of noise, but leave your brain free to do something else.
Bill O'Reilly knew he could just filibuster and enjoy all the airtime that a full interview would give him, and then also grab the sensationalist headlines that he enjoys creating. He used this as fodder for his show for weeks. I wouldn't want to be on the bad side of Bill O'Reilly. But then again, maybe I am now. By giving this interview.
In 1985, I was living with my sister in Virginia, and since I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald's to save money to get an abortion. It sounds really terrible, but it was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I took responsibility for my actions. I messed up, had sex without contraception, and got pregnant at 15.
I have a real problem with rock music because it seems that lineage doesn't really exist. When you grow up, you're told that rock 'n' roll is the only authentic way to express yourself. Live instrumentation, singer, live drums. You're told that's the best medium to communicate. So much of modern rock is referencing music from 20 years ago.
The practice of yoga certainly is a fantastic practice. I only wish I would do it more. I find I can do it alone but it is much better if I have some guidance. Although I can do it alone it is a little bit sloppy. Ultimately, all of those techniques try to bring more oxygen to the brain. We can think and love better if we have more oxygen.
I've gotten to do some really amazing things, gone to some really amazing places, and just have some really unique experiences. And if I have one regret looking back it's that - not a regret even, because I think that's kind of labeling depression as something you can control - but I just wish I would have been able to enjoy it more fully.
I also got encouragement from my teachers at primary school but one person in particular who had a significant impact on my lean towards art is Mr. Luigi St. Omer. Mr. St. Omer was the one who always reminded me that I should not settle for less than greatness in my art. He saw that I had the potential and he helped me develop that talent.
If the only thing that you want to do is make money - if that's your whole motivation - I think you're lying to yourself. If the only motivation you have is to make money and make it, what's making it? Oh, you get a yacht or an island. Well, you're going to need someone to be on that island. You're going to need people, one way or another.
Music didn't really occur to me. Michael Jordan and Batman were my favorite two entities then. Michael Jackson was there, but I didn't really get into Bob Dylan, for instance, until I was in my 20s. The record I heard of his that got me interested in singing was Knocked Out Loaded, which is what many people consider to be his worst record.
Not everyone is going to love you. Not everyone is going to like what you do, and you see a lot of people don't want to let go of the bands that they love. They don't want to move forward. They don't want to let new things come in; they're scared of change. They're scared of new bands taking over their genre. They're just scared of change.
Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That's what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep... Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such.
The record [American Idiot ] felt special to us, when we recorded it, with all of the artwork and the concept behind it and it being a rock opera, but we didn't really know where it was going to go. It's like I always say, you just follow the music. Not only was American Idiot a special moment for us, but it also led to Ordinary World, too.
The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
Little Jimmy Dickens has long been a musical hero of mine and one of the finest entertainers to ever step on any stage. I was deeply honored to call him a friend and will always remember the time I got to spend with him. The music world has lost one of our greatest treasures. Rest in peace, my little friend. You were loved by so many of us!
Not really, definitely not from any outside sources. If there was any pressure it was just from ourselves. We just wanted to make sure that what we were doing was right. But, you know, when you're dealing with any kind of art, I think pressure really doesn't help at all. All you can do is give what comes out of you - and that's what we did.
Maybe some things are better left broken and scattered Veiled in darkness, secret bitterness and self-doubt I should have known better Than to start something that I couldn't finish That I couldn't care about That I couldn't remember starting in the first place I don't want to know you You went years without me You might as well keep going.
I realized that even though I believe with my whole heart in the power of music... it didn't provide any solid answers on how to heal myself and heal others so that they could overcome what had happened to them. I realized that I wanted to take a deeper look at life in order to be some kind of truly healing force in people's everyday lives.
It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.
There's nothing better than having a baby. I've always loved children. I used to work summers at the YMCA and be in charge of, like, 30 preschool kids. I knew that when I had a child, I'd be overwhelmed, and it's true... I can't tell you how much my attitude has changed since we've got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.
People are very surprised to hear me say that a lot of my values are Christian values. I think that's part of my shock. I just don't like the way that Christianity combined with the influence of television has bred a nation of weakness. (Christian television do get the facts wrong sometimes and the image they portray turns most people off.)
Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed.
We'd lie on the floor, turn the lights out, put two speakers on either side of our ears, and try to blow our minds with music. I know that I want to make a record that does that yet a record that, if it was played on the radio at twelve in the afternoon, the guy making the wall - the guy cleaning the motorway - he's got a melody to hang on.
Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying the masters. Rock and roll was white kids trying to make black music and failing, gloriously!
I grew up in a renaissance period, a very lucky time when the greatest music ever made was also the most commercial. We'll never see that again, so for me, there's only one criteria, which is greatness. That's all I care about. Is what I'm doing reaching for greatness? Whether I achieve it or not, that is one hundred percent of my criteria.
Our singer, Matt, was reading Stephen Hawking and other physics-related books, and I was reading entrepreneurial books, and we all started discussing the new technologies that were taking over the world, from 3-D printing to space travel. These conversations starting leading us to think of how we could portray these things in a musical way.
A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime.
There's songs you listen to at really heavy times, and you associate those songs with being depressed. 'English Rose' by The Jam, I can't listen to - it's just too heavy for me. 'Julia' by The Beatles, too. That popped up the other day, and I had to skip to the next song. They're both really awesome, moving songs, but I can't listen to them.
Songs are like a form of chaos that you can control. It's a form of intelligence that maybe you only understand and you hope that someone else can understand. And you can be anyone you want: you can be as grandiose as you want or you can be as down in the gutter as you want. It's just sort of whatever emotional freeway you're on at the time.
There are five known gyres spinning around in our world's oceans. A gyre is a slowly moving spiral of currents created by a high pressure system of air currents. A spinning soup, so to speak, is made of what exists in the water. And in this case, the gyres are spinning with millions of tons of our discarded and forgotten about plastic waste!
The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music.
We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable.
I'm being probably naïve, but I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it's a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don't have any connection to you or relevance to you.
Whether you make an action blockbuster or a comedy or a drama, you've got the right camera and all the right technology to do it. In games, it's not the same yet, and I would like to see technologies dealing with cameras the way we do - dealing with bouquet, dealing with performance capture, with lighting - with all this stuff the way we do.
Bono told me how to dance in high heels and he also told me about U2's Glastonbury performance and how everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, including him ripping his trousers on stage. I think he was lunging and his trousers ripped! He was telling me how he had to find a new way of performing that didn't involve moving.
I always really enjoyed our early days, before we got too famous. We used to play clubs and that kind of stuff all the time. And it was fun. It was good because you get to play and get quite good at the instrument. But then we got famous, and it spoiled all that, because we'd just go round and round the world singing the same 10 dopey tunes.
When I write and produce something, I know exactly how I want it to sound, and I have a very strong interpretation of it. I can't really think of anyone at the moment I'd particularly like to play a duet with. You never know, though, I might receive an offer tomorrow and say, "Yeah, that'd be great." But it's not something that's on my mind.
Bands now are always trying to make their presence known through social networking and whatnot, but that's just the same as bands before the Internet age trying to connect with fans in some other way. But I don't follow people on Facebook, I think that's creepy. I wouldn't want them following me on Facebook. I don't even have a mailing list.
The only people who are afraid of file sharing are the people whose albums are so dull presentation-wise that nobody cares about owning the actual finished product, and the people who have so little connection to their listeners that said listeners have no reason to care whether the artists they like are getting reimbursed for their efforts.
I'm not using drugs to get high like many people think. I know I made a big mistake when I started using this sh-. It's a very difficult thing to explain. My liver is not functioning and I'm throwing up all the time and shitting my pants. The pain is more than you can handle. It's the worst pain in the world. Dope sick hurts the entire body.
We have an older sister who gets pregnant easily. So Emily and I think there may be an environmental cause for our problems. Neither of us were very old when we started trying. But we've lived very parallel lives. We've been in a band together since I was 12 and she was 10. We can't help but wonder, did we stay in a hotel near a power plant?
I will always encourage people to seek out the word of God, because I do believe that THAT is where truth really comes from. I believe that when things go wrong if you instead of looking at that as a negative, you choose to rejoice in all things. It's the hardest thing in the world but I think that that is what ultimately leads to happiness.
Sometimes [playing free] doesn't happen, because maybe a guy's wife'll come in, you know, and his ego will catch him. If everybody's completely just straight-without any old ladies over here, a fourth of whisky over there; if it's balanced right, it'll come off. It has to be. But when you get egos involved with playing free, you can't do it.
The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.
There was a time in my 40s where I thought, oh, it's all over - not just work, but I'm never going to feel young again, I'm always going to feel like I know what's going to happen, I'll know what to expect. Looking back I don't know if that was a midlife crisis, I don't know - but I don't feel that now. There's possibilities. It gets better.
A real good artist is basically a grown-up kid, who never kills the kid. What we call being an adult is basically about killing the kid. People think you have to forget about the kid to become an adult and deal with grown-up problems. But, that's bullshit. We are still kids. It's the same, you just grow up. You're a kid with more experience.
Many of my students learn different techniques online and I have learnt a lot using this medium. Art is picking up in the Caribbean but it's unfortunate that we still have people looking down on it. Many persons who don't know better think that having a career in art is a waste of time. I guess the public just needs to be educated some more.
I always thought if I had a band it would have the energy and feel of early Police, since that's where my roots are, and then the harmonies of the Eagles, and the technique of King Crimson or something like that. Fast, up-tempo, beat-the-hell-out-of-the-drums, because that's my style. Energy, but sophistication, rhythmically and melodically.
I've always thought that each album would be my last one, and then I would be out of ideas and I would move to photography or something. I thought it was transient and it's not because of this entrenched career stubbornness that I've done it for so long, it's just something I enjoy doing, and it's the most direct way I can express something.