Stephen Malkmus Quotes
With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
Quotes to Explore
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The things that drive me are poverty, and pain, and knowing that I don't want to end up being alone and I want to do something with my life and I want the name Dobson to remain in everyone's heads. Basically, just to rock and be the best performer I can be, and be true, and be real, and give people the real Fefe, nothing fake, all real.
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I like rock music because it's always sonically fascinating. There's never a method to what it needs to sound like. It's just however that instrument comes out that day, whatever the humidity level was in the air, what studio you were at. All that makes that tone that you can't re-create, so each song is like a person.
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Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
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Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
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I was always fascinated with rock 'n' roll, or girls, or something like that when I was a kid.
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I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
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I don't know if it's possible to live the rock 'n roll lifestyle and still be romantic.
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I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
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Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
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Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
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I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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As far as stand-ups go, I always loved Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Sinbad. Basically, I love black comedians because they're the funniest. I wish I were a black comedian, actually.
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I started listening to gospel when I was a little boy and my grandmother used to rock me on her lap.
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We were sitting on the bus one day and there were 5 of us hanging out. There was only one beer left in the cooler and we actually all took a little cup and split it. It was a pathetic day in a rock and roll when five grown men have to be sitting there sharing a beer.
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No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job....Poetry..remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
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We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the best at manipulating others.
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To have someone to relate to and hopefully enjoy the music and get a positive message out of it, to make the best music that we possibly could, those were the goals.
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With DNA, the ability to find out a lot more with a lot less has increased our ability for identification.
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It's always fun to play someone like an action hero that you always wanted to play as a child. I think every young boy loves that as a kid.
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With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
