The Birthday Party Quotes
- All Quotes
- News Quotes
-
What I think about when I frequent the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I look at these artifacts that are taken out of context and how we're forced to view them as objects, as relics, as sculpture- static. But what's interesting is what it allows me to do in my head in terms of imagining what the possibilities are or imagining the role in which they played within a particular culture which I'm fascinated by.
-
Being a parent can make you a horrible person at times, because you're pushed to the limit constantly.
-
It is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God...The love song is the sound of our endeavors to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.
-
The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write.
-
I have an armchair interest in gardening, but I don't like to get my knees dirty. I don't have a garden.
-
Moving to the country is a very bold thing to do. You can have vague romantic notions about doing that, but in actuality, it can be a terrifying thing.
-
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
-
I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.
-
The more settled I've become, the more problematic my characters have become. There was a period when I wrote sensitive and gentle songs and these came at a time when life was at its most destructive. I think you write about what you need, on some level.
-
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
-
You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.
-
It's very intuitive, the way that I approach my work. I only buy something that has a pulse. I may not know how I'm going to use it, but I know it has a pulse and it has multiple readings - if I shift it one way or another, it can be read this way or it can be read that way, but both readings are critical and very much ground the work.
-
Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.
-
There are times when I think I can sing it better, but usually I find that I can't.
-
It was about the preciousness of that, and how they viewed those birds as art, as something valuable. I didn't care one way or another back then, but now, thinking about my grandparents - who are still alive but getting older - I see the birds as sort of time capsules. Now I go home during the holidays and they hold a lot of weight in terms of nostalgia and memory. Now they mean everything.
-
The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor.
-
Hamlet got a gun now.
-
I love performing. I can get to be that person I always wanted to be - godlike.
-
I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously.
-
The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like 'I want you to burn' it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it's much more open, broader.
-
God is in everything whether I'm mentioning him or not.
-
I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.
-
There's always pain around. That's one thing you can guarantee in life - there will always be a surplus of pain.
-
Brother, be a brother, fill this tiny cup of mine. And please, sir, make it whiskey: I have no head for wine!