Stephen Malkmus Quotes

I don't know if you look back on your life and just see successes, but probably the first things that pop up are the regrets.

If you have no shame, and it’s your goal to get people into bed, how much higher could your success rate possibly be?

You can change the world, but if no one's listening, it doesn't matter.

I'm not dying for everyone to hear everything we do. Forty minutes every two years is sensible.

There's always a chance, a goal to make something different and get it right, finally.

That's why you go to a nice studio. You can get a magic take. You don't really have to do anything to it.

Basically, no one else gives me any opinions on lyrics. I don't ask for them. If they did, I would listen.

I really do think everybody can sing.

I do play soccer, but it's exhausting in a way.

I just imagine that every song in and of itself is great, but when you add them all up, it's too much of me maybe.

So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn't feel dangerous to me. They just feel like "rock lyrics."

I don't even think my voice is really good.

Well, yeah, I sang to some songs on the radio or in the shower.

It's normally in the morning, just playing around. And I'm not saying everything I make is great, but that's what I do. I can't even remember how I wrote stuff.

What producers did was mostly recording in the studio, so it never changed our sound just that much.

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.

Lyrics are back, maybe. It seems like there was a bit of an attitude that lyrics are not important.

I don't really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.

You don't realize that when you're young, and you're surprised there's a lot of people at your gig - you just think it's general British-press hype.

Usually [the lyrics] go from one word to the next word - there's no finish line. The music was that way, too.

I like visual imagery in my head.

Men are men and women are women, but the men are dumber than the women, usually.

We [ Paverment] were definitely unafraid of playing wrong notes and singing wrong things. We could be fearlessly bad!

I'm thinking, I'm singing like Ozzy Osbourne, but I don't sound like him enough, ever.

I'm better when I'm an autodidact and things just come. Or you're just blessed. I'm not bragging or anything, it just comes to you.

With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that.