Michael Stipe (John Michael Stipe) Quotes

Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.

Michael Stipe R.E.M.

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Quotes to Explore

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Drugs
  • Died
  • Lover

• We don't get groupies.We get teenagers who want to read us their poetry.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Poetry
  • Teenagers
  • Groupies

• For every great thing we did, there is a very public moment of falling on our faces. But everything that came through us as a band was a distinct vision of R.E.M.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Vision
  • Falling
  • Great Thing

• The whole point of the punk-rock thing was that "We're not special. We just have a voice."

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Voice
  • Point
  • Punk Rock

• In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Critics
  • Develop
  • American Music

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Long
  • Water
  • Ocean

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Joy
  • Write
  • Melancholy

• When I get really hammered I take my clothes off. That's a sure sign. It's been a long time since the last time I did that. Probably a year.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Time
  • Long

• The only thing to fear is fearlessness.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Fear
  • Fearlessness

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Mistakes
  • Glory
  • Losing My Religion

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Science
  • Generation
  • Environmental

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Together
  • Artwork
  • Homage

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Play
  • Nightmare
  • Performer

• 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 R.E.M.
  • House
  • Records
  • Prevent

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Project
  • Phone
  • Plane Ticket

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Responsibility
  • Aids
  • Terrified

• A wise man once said, 'The skill in attending a party is knowing when it's time to leave.'

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Party
  • Leave
  • Wise Man

• Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.

• The song "Sing for the Submarine" presents my dream world, which is way different from my waking world. It's set in the future and it's post-apocalyptic.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Future
  • Song
  • Dream World

• To be called an elder statesman is so unbelievably insulting. Brad Pitt is exactly three years younger than me.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Insulting
  • Statesman
  • Brad Pitt

• 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 R.E.M.
  • Sex
  • Aids
  • Vegetarian

• If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Great
  • America

• My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Feeling
  • Food

• Anybody that walks can sing.

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Sing
  • Walks