Michael Stipe
On planes I always cry. Something about altitude, the lack of oxygen and the bad movies. I cried over a St. Bernard movie once on a plane. That was really embarrassing.Collection: Movies
We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.Collection: Death
Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.Collection: Music
My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.Collection: Food
Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.
So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it's wallpaper to them, it's elevator music, it's just the thing that's playing in the background that helps them through their day.
I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.
We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.
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.
And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.
Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.
I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.
When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes. Keep your money in your shoes.
I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about.
I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.
If I'm tired of me, I'm sure the public is as well.
But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we're very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.
My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.
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.
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.
They always want me to play myself and that's a big snooze.
I really wanted to be on Six Feet Under as a corpse. That would be hysterical.
There are people that very strongly identify themselves as gay and then lesbian, and then I think there are a lot of people who are kind of some percentage or some version of that.
I think there were early critics who wanted us to change the world because the Sex Pistols failed.
Super casual music listeners. That's most of the people in the world. And you have to understand, that's why Top 40 radio exists. It's not there for people who seek out music and who love music.
There was never a golden era of American radio as far as I can tell.
When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.
So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.
So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we're kind of an international phenomenon.
But we're very much an American band and that's that. I think that's part of the appeal outside of this country and it might be part of the reason people turned away from us within this country, because familiarity breeds contempt.
There was a point in the '80s when I looked out at my audience and I saw people that - were I not on the stage - they'd sooner slug me as they walked by me on the sidewalk. And I realized that I was way beyond the choir.
I'm not homosexual, I'm not hetrosexual, I'm just sexual.
If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!
Sometimes I'm confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn't obvious.Collection: Confused
A wise man once said, 'The skill in attending a party is knowing when it's time to leave.'Collection: Wise
Be yourself. Follow your heart. I know it sounds obvious, but it's the best advice at anyone ever. Take advice from other people, but take from it what feels right for you.Collection: Being Yourself
I've never written a song that's hopeless. I'm not a hopeless person. I'm crazily optimistic. I crazily see the good in people. I crazily see the way out of a terrible situation. I crazily try to be the diplomat. If there are two warring factions in my life, I want them to agree to disagree at the very least.Collection: Song
The only thing to fear is fearlessness.Collection: Fear
There tend to be two different drives that lead young people toward music. One is that music provides an escape; it takes you away from the unhappiness or torture of where you are and makes you feel less alienated-you believe there is a place you fit in somewhere else. The other is a sort of transcendent, spiritual feeling in the purity of music.Collection: Spiritual
Love, love will be my strongest weaponCollection: Love
The whole point of the punk-rock thing was that "We're not special. We just have a voice."Collection: Rocks
Anybody that walks can sing.Collection: Walks
The punk-rock ethos was "Do it yourself. Anyone can do this. We're not sent from the heavens."Collection: Rocks
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.Collection: Wall
By nature I will find hope in everything. Even if it's the most incredibly hopeless situation or circumstance. That's just me... I'll never be able to see things any other way.Collection: Hope
I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.Collection: Guy
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.Collection: Writing
Links have become the suburbs of the real world.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Sex