Devendra Banhart Quotes

I had TB as a child. So I was put to doing things like drawing and reading. And I was raised in a family where manners were important. Maybe that's why I seem so refined.

I mean, I grew up with pretty down-to-earth, atheist parents, but I was born a Pisces.

I didn't come from a background of films. I didn't even really ever watch films. The fact is, my parents weren't into that stuff, and neither was I.

I love my dad. It's fair to say that I probably would not have thought of politics had I not seen my mom and dad involved in politics.

My family have shaped my politics more than anything else.

My parents are kind of young, and my dad always listened to rock music and stuff like that, so I sort of grew up around that. As far as acting goes, I didn't really have any major influences because it wasn't really something that I focused on.

I lived with my mom my whole life; her work ethic was ridiculous, and it hasn't changed.

I grew up as a Muslim: it was quite a conservative upbringing; I didn't wear mini-skirts. But my mum and dad had a good sense of humour and were creative. I guess all of that shaped me.

Perhaps the itinerant upbringing my brothers and I had has something to do with my continued interest in perspectives different from my own.

When I have a cocktail, I love a vodka and cranberry. But when I was a kid my mother was really against drinking, because it was so bad for your skin. She'd say, "Stephanie, it's much better to wash your face with vodka."

Between the two [parents], it was a really unique upbringing, I think, especially for where I was from.

I've tried Buddhism, Scientology, Numerology, Transcendental Meditation, Qabbala, t'ai chi, feng shui and Deepak Chopra but I find straight gin works best.

I've always had a bawdy sense of humor. My father was a traveling salesman and he would bring jokes home. He would say, "Honey, you can take this one to school, but you can't take that one to school."

I was born rich. Not in tangible things... but rich in the parents I had.

My brother and I both like sarcastic, insulting comedy, so that's a way we communicate. Somehow that's what we learned. My mom is not a really sarcastic person. She's a really sort of overly loving person, and my brother and I came out little cynical bastards.

People are not losing their religious needs, but they are going to three places to get their needs met. One is to conservative churches, which, for all their social benightedness, nevertheless do present their congregations with a different view of reality. Second, they are going to Asian religions. Third, they are going to the New Age, which when I'm feeling cynical I refer to as "New Age frivolity," because some of it is rather flaky.

Don't be more serious than God. God invented dog farts.

I suspect that had my dad not been president, he'd be asking the same questions: How'd your meeting go with so-and-so? . How did you feel when you stood up in front of the people for the State of the Union Address-state of the budget address, whatever you call it.

First, I wanted to answer the question I'm most frequently asked: "How did you become who you are?" Well, you had to know John and Angelena Rice.

Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama - his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence - these came from Kansas, not Kenya.

In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.

...this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate.

LAUGHTER is the very essence of religion. Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious. Seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness. Yes, there is a difference between when you laugh and when a religious man laughs. The difference is that you laugh always about others - the religious man laughs at himself, or at the whole ridiculousness of man's being. Religion cannot be anything other than a celebration of life.

I don't know what it's like to not work; my family embedded that in me.