Michael Cera Quotes

Music does not carry you along. You have to carry it along strictly by your ability to really just focus on that little small kernel of emotion or story.

Our music is harder to play than it sounds. It's the small details you don't realize are there until you try and re-do it.

Some specialist guitar music is not of the highest intellectual calibre, so I must make it sound as though it is. If it bores me, it certainly won't please an audience.

I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

Your choices and decisions are a reflection of how well you’ve set and followed your priorities.

People have stopped battling in hip hop, in the primitive sense, and the focus of the competitive element has shifted to the music. It's less about bragging and more about being the best lyrically and poetically.

When making a decision, focus on what feels "shackles off" versus "shackles on".

Goals reflect your choice of destination.

My UK fans are quite similar to the States but they pay much more attention to the details, that I like. They listen, party, and dance moving through the changing moods of the music with me.

When you know what's most important to you, making a decision is quite simple.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

At the end of the day, there are a hell of a lot of notes being played out there and I defy the average middle-American or the average punter to differentiate between them.

I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen.

Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Anything you attend to carefully can bring blessing.

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing

When you take on the position of president, you are committing yourself to, first and foremost, protecting the American people. You are accepting an institutional role that requires you to make hard decisions and hard choices, and as a consequence you have to take your moral sense and not put it aside.

Technique to me is a kind of a ... I'm reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.

I don't know if I have a problem expressing joy, but the difficulty is in making an album, a piece of music that really does reflect life rather than the one dimension. I have a problem in trying to make a complete trip record.

Focusing is about saying No.

I'm making music for other people to listen to for pleasure. And hopefully, later on maybe they'll listen to it and go, "That bass line, boy, did you hear the way those drums interacted with that?"

Constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it home at last, so that it can be clinched. When a man's undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once.