Stephen Malkmus Quotes

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

I can actually see the sound in my head. I can actually see it... But each sound is different so this one has that sparkle, there is a sparkle to the sound.

I like working with sound; sound and rhythm. I like the abstract more than "What does that mean?" Nobody ever says to you, "Why did you use a harmonium?" Or "What is that ringing sound that occurs here?" The questions are always "What does that song mean?" or "What were you trying to say here?"

My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds and if I don't get them together nobody else will.

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

Music stands in a much closer connection with pure sensation than any of the other arts.

Something I am wondering: if you cannot hear do you have no sounds in your head? Do you see a silent movie

I saw a tree fall in the woods, and I didn't hear it.

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.

If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution - but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.

This is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

The flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting.

As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

In noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men. Clamour, Melody, Dissonance, Harmony; when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man’s time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of the purpose and power, of the dream – Music.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

The mind's capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind.