Stephen Malkmus
I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.Collection: Book
Besides, going on tour and playing songs and arranging things, going to practice, it's all I know to be productive.Collection: Song
It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.Collection: Records
Family is the best. I can honestly say, it's a gift that is beyond making art. I didn't know that when I got into it.Collection: Art
George Oppen wasn't a larger than life personality, but I'm not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too.Collection: Flames
My wife is a big fan of George Oppen and I got into him. I could have a career like his. It's not an alpha male situation, George Oppen. It's quiet. It's poetry.He just lived a life of an intellectual poet.Collection: Careers
I thought The Doors were the greatest band for a while.Collection: Doors
I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don't come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can't do a riff album. I'm more of a song, melody person.Collection: Song
I know the world doesn't need maybe another of [a particular type of song] - the same thing again - but you can't help yourself. And some people like it, but you kind of know in your heart that it's a lesser version of what you've done before. But maybe it has a good tempo, or it feels fresh, but it's still not.Collection: Song
Things tends to often [consolidate] like Disney. It's the same with music. There's Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and Patti Smith. There's these three people that everyone seems to agree on. No matter what they like, they seem to like those three.Collection: People
If there can be some paradigm shift thing that you can be part of, that's cool.Collection: Paradigm
My wife says that I changed people's lives or ways of thinking and that I should always be proud and grateful. If I'm dismissive of what we do sometimes, a little bit, she's like, "I was a fan, you changed my life," or whatever. That's what she says.Collection: Grateful
When a band means a lot to you, you build the fantasy more than the reality. Always.Collection: Mean
Don't go to the same studio twice, or work with the same engineer twice.Collection: Engineers
I'm not dying for things to say.Collection: Dying
I'm just kind of a hippie. Age is not that relevant to the music.Collection: Hippie
We care if people like what we did. If you're just making records for yourself, why put them out and do all these interviews and do touring? I'm a huge music fan, and this is what I do with my artistic time. It's all I really do, except hang out with my family. I value human relationships, and it's a way for me to interact with the world and feel like I'm part of something.Collection: People
Berlin is just an affordable European city that's supposed to be cool. There's nothing too deep about it.Collection: Being Cool
It's easy to be negatively funny about personalities in the media. It's just kind of a cheap laugh.Collection: Media
Everyone wants to be loved, generally. If you released a record and nobody said anything, if you didn't get any feedback from people you don't know, i.e. the press, you'd be sort of upset. To me, any press is good press.Collection: People
Like the song "Stereo", to me that's like, kind of hip-hop in that slacker way. There's some slackerisms mixed in with that stuff, but it wasn't really conscious, I guess. When things would get more typical rock'n'roll that was my fallback to go to those kind of lyrics instead of the alternatives.Collection: Song
But we're still rehearsing and planning to make a new album next year. We have some really good new songs that we've already been playing on that last tour that we just finished.Collection: Song
You know, it's people's lives, so as you get a little older, your own life narrative, I guess, invades a little more. It's not like we're traveling in separate buses to each show. It's a labor of love, so we just do it because we like it. Maybe someone's gonna move, or not want to go on a tour for some reason - that could happen, I guess.Collection: Moving
I would just imagine there's a criticism for just about everything, if you want to take something down. No one's invincible. The Jicks are a work in progress and we don't think everything we do is the bee's knees or something, we're just trying our best to get turned on by what we're doing.Collection: Thinking
If someone's really busy listening to other CDs, and worried about what's new and what's truly relevant for discourse now, maybe it isn't that interesting. To me it is, because I'm tuned into that and that's what I like, so it's interesting to me. It's all I can do.Collection: Listening To Others
I hated it so much as a child. I just didn't like it when punk bands went metal, it really bothered me. It was happening left and right in the 1980s. It started I think with D.C. bands - G.I., Soul Side, they went metal. Right at that time, R.E.M. was coming out, these more kinda feminine bands, and I was more drawn to that than to go metal. And you remember MTV, with the bad metal. But even Metallica, it just wasn't my direction.Collection: Children
The earlier stuff is more like "this is happening to me," but now there are more songs that are accusatory or something, or more declaratory. I don't know where that voice comes from, like, "I've been down the road, we've been there and done that." That's sort of like a tougher style, or a less vulnerable style.Collection: Song
You know, the songs that are self-conscious or jerky, they are that way, but the other ones aren't, so that's a good thing. Some of the songs are Beck-jokey, but the others, they have heart in them.Collection: Song
I think most musicians know if they make the same record twice, even if they say they don't.Collection: Thinking
[As a frontman ] I'm going to wear leather pants and get blowjobs in the studio. That would be nice. They are definitely not cool, but I like them. I don't listen to them, but I like them when I hear them on the radio, normally.Collection: Nice
If you have no shame, and it’s your goal to get people into bed, how much higher could your success rate possibly be?Collection: People
I don't want to be in Mötley Crüe or something.Collection: Want
I do play soccer, but it's exhausting in a way.Collection: Soccer
I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.Collection: Writing
One time I went to Berlin and, for some reason, everywhere I was going they had fishbowls. Like a fishbowl by your bed or a fish tank in the bar. They seem obsessed with this IKEA version of nature, which a fishbowl kind of is. They had that going on. I just don't really like having a goldfish by the side of my bed. I feel kind of sad for it, rather than happy. But I thought that was really weird. Maybe they have human fishbowls.Collection: Kind
I still hate [the Eagles]…. There’s levels of evil in it to me.Collection: Hate
When you do a cover it's a way to get attention clicking on something. At the Quiet Music Festival, The Jicks did this Nirvana song, very unrehearsed and not important, but then all the websites were like, "They covered Nirvana!" People like covers of famous people.Collection: Song
You can change the world, but if no one's listening, it doesn't matter.Collection: Listening
There's no reason to stop. Who knows what's around the bend? To participate, meet new people. It's mostly other musicians and people like you, or anybody I meet who's in this, that keeps me going.Collection: People
Some people, they've had a lot of fun, even if it was dumb fun and a shitty body of work.Collection: Fun