Conor Oberst Quotes

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.

I'm a big hip-hop fan since being a kid. It was the first music that spoke to me and made me feel like, 'Yeah.'

The Smiths was an incredibly personal thing to me. It was like launching your own diary to music.

Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

I believe in the relation between photography and music; And thats my inspiration.

Me and hip-hop have a relationship that has nothing to do with no other rapper, no matter where you from or nothing. Every n*gga got his own personal relationship with hip-hop and this is mine.

I don't expect everyone to get something deep out of it. Some people can just listen to the music, or get their aggressions out, but I think with any great painting or movie, album or whatever it is, it's better if people can take what they need from it. That they're not forced to get some particular message.

I've had a lot of people come up to me after shows and tell me that "Dollhouse" really helped them with whatever they were going through with their families. I thought that was really amazing, that it could mean one thing for me but another thing for someone else.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

The good thing about movies is that they're subjective. You can connect to different themes depending on your own perspective.

To see itself through, music must have idea or magic. ... Music with neither dies young though rich.

I'm still very affected and moved by their music - maybe in a way that's different from someone who grew up around it.

When I write something, it's usually 'cause I think it's funny or I have a way in, but when I direct something, I really need to be close to it.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.

I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people... They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to be too deep about it, but when we play shows, music takes everybody on their own journey - because one song might mean something to me, that means something completely different to someone else.

My work is immaterial. It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's emotions. I'm giving you something to experience yourself.

A good song to one person could just be something mediocre to somebody else. It's always strange thinking about how songs connect with people.

For example, if it's a sad scene, I need to feel that way, at least to a slight degree and for a short while, to get it right. Which is why I sometimes listen to music when I'm revising. Music creates moods for me quicker than any other medium.

Whenever new ideas emerge, songs soon follow, and before long the songs are leading.

It's so much more fun to do the work than to talk about it. I will have to admit that. Everybody gets to decide how they feel, and what to take away by themselves, and that's what you hope for. That people will take away different things and have different experiences from the work we do as actors. So I don't like to prescribe how to feel about the work I do.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.