Trent Reznor Quotes

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I quietly work with my computer on the tour bus, and then I wait to make my more natural rhythms when I get home.

The funny thing about making this record and being away from the girls and on my own in LA is that it allowed me to reflect on how much we've accomplished.

When you're on tour, you're trying to get the crowd involved and really sing and perform to them. When you're going to write and be in the studio, it's like, 'Now I have to think about me.' That's the mind-set you have to work with.

I would be more at peace if I could just record music and slide it under the door.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.

With all the touring and distractions going on, I would get a sound together but I wouldn't have time to work on it. So I sat on the road with the sketches and saw how they revealed themselves emotionally.

I don't like to disappear between records. I like to play shows while I'm making the record.

I think taking too long to work on a record you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour and I write and I write. And I send them to the guys, and we start planning our studio ventures.

The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

I had an opportunity to make an album - that was a dream come true. I had to make sure that I could do it the best way I could, and at least at the end of it be very pleased with it and not regret anything. So that took a lot of concentration. Being isolated really helps with that.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.

For Joe Budden fans, and for Joe Budden, I like to focus on the creative side, and havin' a thought and bein' able to execute it in the booth. I think that song best displays me being able to do that.

I haven't felt compelled to go back in the studio and do anything serious. I have a little sort of home studio thing which I potter about in occasionally.

When I was done with the movie [Ordinary World], I felt really compelled to start working on another album. Little did I know, they were going to come out back to back.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

The songs started as a soundscapes, and then came the words and music; each song took at least a year to make.

I love making music. I never stop. I want to keep it moving forward. I like to go into the studio and make hits. It makes me feel good.

I used to be somebody. Now I’m somebody else.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

I show up knowing exactly who I was and never leave as myself.

I play the living hell out of my guitars daily, and as sure as the sun rises in the east, killer licks, ideas, grooves, patterns and songs erupt every time.

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.