Regina Spektor
Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space experience.Collection: Experience
I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust?Collection: Space
You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.
I go through insanity before a show. It's not really a process but it's like absolute mortal fear.
I've done that kind of stuff in records, where you start going back and you want to just redo everything, destroy everything, because you think it all sucks and you can do it better.
Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible.
This is the way I wanna die. Torn apart by angry fans who want me to play a different song.
When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.
I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.
I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know any more if this is the awesomest way to live.
I'd always wanted to work in the studio and experiment with sounds. Things that I'm really influenced by and that I love are like The Beatles and Radiohead, and all those records by bands whose music is really involved.
I figured, 'If I ever get offered a chance to sign a deal, I'll only do it if I got to do it how I want.' So my contract is structured in such a way that I'm really protected.
The only thing they really get to pick is the single. But I get to pick the producer, the songs on the record, the final masters, the artwork. Basically, I hand them a record.
I care so much about making things that are useful for people to have and listen to, but I don't care so much that I won't do whatever the hell I want. It's just one of those things.
I'm like, 'Would you be the person in the room that would boo when Dylan went electric? I know I wouldn't. Or are you the person that left The Beatles after 'She Loves You,' or 'Drive My Car?' You weren't on board for 'Revolution 9' or 'Day In The Life,' were you?'
It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.
I just like being all over the place and writing whatever comes to mind. Having the tools? It's such a gift.
I knew all this Beatles music. I knew the songs phonetically. It was like my whole experience of that music was out of focus, and somebody put the perfect glasses on me, and all of a sudden I could see everything.
I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.
It's not like I have all the answers.
It feels very good to sing in Russian. It feels so good inside my body.
I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
Every morning I wake up with a purpose and a smirkCollection: Morning
The other day I was down by the Hudson River, and I see two nuns in full habit rollerblading down the street holding hands. And I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I get it. The world is surreal and beautiful. And everything is fine.'Collection: Inspirational
I'm the hero of this story, I don't need to be savedCollection: Hero
This is how it works You're young until you're not You love until you don't You try until you can't You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath No, this is how it works You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And try to love the things you took And then you take that love you made And stick it into some Someone else's heart Pumping someone else's blood And walking arm in arm You hope it don't get harmed But even if it does You'll just do it all againCollection: Love You
You get to be your own curator of your own exhibits inside.Collection: Curator
Pick a star on the dark horizon and follow the light.Collection: Stars
All the monsters in your mind just want to be nice. They want to be kind. They want to play nice. They want to be softer than the storms around. You feel them through the windows and the doors.Collection: Nice
You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.Collection: Cancer
So break me to small parts, let go in small doses, but spare some for spare parts.Collection: Letting Go
I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.Collection: Thinking
Not everything in the world is easy or powerful.Collection: Powerful
I think it's ridiculous that we even have to talk about gay rights as rights...It's gonna be as shocking as the treatment of slaves someday.Collection: Gay
I was a kid, and I was very excited to experience this whole new world. And everything was fun, everything from, oh, wow, we get bananas - I'd only seen them in picture books, you know - to, like, the diversity of the neighborhood and to explore Judaism for the first time. It was really hushed in the Soviet Union.Collection: Fun
I think that when somebody tells you something of value, a lot of the time there's this thing that happens, and I don't know if you find it, where they go exactly for the word or the moment or the thing that you were hoping they wouldn't notice, or inside didn't feel 100 percent secure about. If they point it out, then that really sends you the message of, "Okay, I was trying to override my own instincts about it, and I guess I shouldn't."Collection: Thinking
I'm much more drawn to fiction, to short stories, and to plays, than I am to diarists.Collection: Play
I feel different. You know this many times over, because you are a parent, but it transforms you. It's this incredible experience where, in one way, you are still very much yourself, and in some ways you become even more connected to the rest of yourself. All of a sudden, you just get more connected to your child self, and your teenage self, and all these selves that you've maybe been abandoning at every date post that you pass.Collection: Children
I just think music is one of those frontiers where people really want the "I" to be you.Collection: Thinking
The piano is not firewood -- yet.Collection: Piano
I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.Collection: Thinking
I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka.Collection: Stories
Pickle jars are just pickle jars, and pickles are just pickles.Collection: Jars
We’re trying to be faithful but we’re cheating, cheating, cheatingCollection: Cheating
We're living in a den of thievesCollection: Thieves
I've got a perfect body, 'cause my eyelashes catch my sweatCollection: Eyelashes
You're using your headphones to drown out your mindCollection: Mind
[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember.Collection: Song