Hozier
I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.Collection: Faith
I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.Collection: Poetry
I think marriage is a scary concept. It's a scary concept for anybody. I'm not sure where I sit with that.Collection: Marriage
All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music.Collection: Music
I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death: a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment - if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes - everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.Collection: Experience
I would love to get in trouble with the Catholic Church. I'm not religious myself, but my issue is with the organization. It's an organization of men - it's not about faith.Collection: Faith
I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music. I'm not sure if every song will be 'Take Me to Church,' but I can only hope that people enjoy the body of work that I have ahead of me.Collection: Hope
My musical education was grounded in blues and Chicago blues - John Lee Hooker and Otis Redding.Collection: Education
Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.Collection: Marriage
Social media is an advertisement for the superficial extroverted self.
We all run the risk of thinking that people have common sense sometimes.
Some of the earlier stuff I did in studio with producers was very pop-directed, which I was uncomfortable with.
I try to face things without regret, or make sure that I'm happy with things and leave nothing unsaid if I can.
You grow up and recognize that in any educated secular society, there's no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognize in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.
I like playing with light and shade. I like saying awful things in very pretty ways.
I don't like false happy endings, and I don't think the real world is such a forgiving place.
I try to be happy. I try to face things without regret or make sure that I'm happy with things and leave nothing unsaid if I can.
I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs.
I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.
Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.
Regardless of the sexual orientation behind a relationship, it is still a relationship and still love.
Much of social media can be seen as the 'News of me.' It's not so much a platform for connecting and sharing as it is a platform for advertising the idea of yourself you want to portray to others: the image of yourself you want to project.
One of my favorite books is 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell, and 'Catcher in the Rye,' obviously, is a big influence and is one of my favorites.
If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.
Growing up in Ireland, there are a lot of aspects of God that hang in the air. And my music reflects that.
I'm influenced a lot by Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, even Paul Weller - Billie Holiday as well: People who wrote and sang songs that were reflective of their times. I quite like that. I quite admire that.
Love isn't any one good thing; it's a very, very strange mishmash of emotions. Your love for somebody is, oftentimes, informed by the terrible things you might believe about yourself, and comparatively, the person you see them as is everything that you're not.
When I first started to sing, I just swung at it with an axe.
I'm not cross about the idea of baptism; I just think the idea that when a child is born it is inherently sinful and carries sin and needs to be cleaned in order for it to be all right and all good with its creator, I just think that's an absurd notion.
I wish I had more time to read. I'm always traveling.
I don't know if I'll ever get married. I have no plans to not get married.
It's so easy to look forward when you're travelling; you spend your life looking forward, thinking, 'What's next? When do I get time to work on my music again? Or when do I get time to get my 'normal' life back?'
I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.
I'm not quite used to being seen through the eyes of fans yet. Being met with squeals and screams - I haven't gotten used to that.
Being 16 is the worst time to be anybody, there is not enough tea in China to persuade me to be that young again. I wasn't very happy with myself.
By nature, I'm an awkward person; I'm a gangly introvert.
I was definitely drawn to the mythology of one man, one voice, and one guitar.
I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.
My hair grows into a fuzz ball - I just wanted it to grow downwards rather than outwards - but then I realized I couldn't play guitar with it that way. I couldn't do anything day-to-day without my hair getting in my mouth or my eyes or my food, so I just started tying it back, long before I knew what a man bun was.
I remember one of the first albums I got was an album called 'Thin Lizzy: Live and Dangerous.'
I'm an awful control freak at times when it comes to production and stuff like that.
If I don't think something's worth saying, I don't think it's quite there, I'd rather just not say it, to be honest. In that case, I'd rather wait 'till the thought is ready, 'till I feel like I'm happy with everything.
As I listened more and more to the music that moved me, I gained more fascination with America.
I think it is important to differentiate between lip service towards something and actually making change.
I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.
No Facebook status is as worrying as a vote and no tweet is as noticeable as an angry cry from a crowd outside a government building.
I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.
Religion wasn't imposed on me. I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.
The first time I heard Tom Waits, it was like everything just flipped. It was just this fascination with him. My cousin showed me 'Small Change,' and I just couldn't get over that this was a white guy singing.
It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.