Sufjan Stevens Quotes

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

Art, unlike the trades in the artistic capacity of fashion and food, can literally be anything. It can be the negation of itself and conceptually not present.

That's what we get to do as songwriters, right? You get to explore stuff.

I tell people, 'I don't make music, I make worlds.'

When I write music, I know a lot of artists like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran tend to write from personal experience. I write from personal experience, of course, but I don't limit myself to that.

I always wanted to make a children's album because you have the freedom to explore so many wonderful topics and sounds.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

I want to do nothing chic, I want to have ideas before beginning a piece.

You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.

But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

There is no must in art because art is free.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

Music is chaos. When I write songs, I'm opening the door to madness.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

'Love Letter' is a concept album, and whenever I do a concept album - and I love doing concept albums more than any other kind of album - it allows me to get dressed, in a way, musically.

The Soft Machine's 'Volume Two' inspired me heavily. That record just feels like it was all done in the same breath. It's genius, and it's silly at times. But I love the fact that every time I listen to it, I listen from the beginning and want to play it out.

Music is the embodiment of my soul. When I play, I'm not performing a song: I'm becoming it.

People that are able to think in terms of concepts and offer us valuable forms of art are very exciting to me.

The main thing for all of us was having a ballad, a slower song. Finally, they get to hear more of a vulnerable side to us! We didn't really have that in 'Reflection,' and that's something we all fought for.