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.

Stephen Malkmus Pavement

• Rock
• Poetry
• Heroes
• My Mind

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

  

  F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • You
  • Poetry
  • Quit

• 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.

  

  Fefe Dobson
  • People
  • Life
  • Up

• 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.

  

  Bobby Ray Simmons Jr.
  • Music
  • Song
  • Day

• Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

  

  Mahmoud Darwish
  • Beautiful
  • Peace
  • Poetry

• 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.

  

  Ed Koch
  • People
  • Art
  • Poetry

• I was always fascinated with rock 'n' roll, or girls, or something like that when I was a kid.

  

  Gary Sinise
  • Rock
  • Always
  • Kid

• 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.

  

  C. K. Williams
  • People
  • Life
  • Poetry

• Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

  

  Tahar Ben Jelloun
  • Words
  • Relationship
  • Poetry

• Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

  

  T. S. Eliot
  • Time
  • May
  • Poetry

• 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.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • True
  • Poetry
  • Literature

• I don't know if it's possible to live the rock 'n roll lifestyle and still be romantic.

  

  Adam Levine Maroon 5
  • Live
  • Rock
  • Romantic

• 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.

  

  Omari Hardwick
  • Trying
  • Poetry
  • California

• Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

  

  Carl Sandburg
  • Poetry
  • Door
  • Moment

• 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.

  

  Patrick White
  • Writing
  • Age
  • Running

• None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

  

  Edith Hamilton
  • Pain
  • Poetry
  • Tragedy

• 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.

  

  Eavan Boland
  • Life
  • Mother
  • Wife

• The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.

  

  Vanessa Diffenbaugh
  • Book
  • Poetry
  • Flower

• 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.

  

  Umberto Eco
  • Writing
  • Love
  • Poetry

• 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.

  

  Adam DeVine
  • Love
  • Black
  • Wish

• I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it's what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.

  

  Fortune Feimster
  • Money
  • Comedy
  • Doing

• I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.'

  

  Max Brooks
  • Live
  • Job
  • Book

• When I started writing it was kind of hard getting people to do my stuff. They' say they couldn't do my style.

  

  Otis Blackwell
  • People
  • Writing
  • Style

• Don't call me, I'll call you... I'm out.

  

  Kevin O'Leary

• 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.

  

  Stephen Malkmus Pavement
  • Rock
  • Poetry
  • Heroes