Elliott Smith Quotes

I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.

There's no huge, deep message in any of the songs. We recorded a few months of being human.

No, I don't think songwriting is emotionally challenging - I feel like it's almost a way to sort through your emotions and put them out there.

About 25 years ago, when I was 15, I wrote a song called 'Indradhanush', which speaks about the seven colours, equating each with emotions that we as human beings experience.

I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

Music has always helped me stay creative and grounded because I'm traveling and shooting and trying to understand other people. Music was something I could just sit in a room and make with my friends.

All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.

Criticism didn't really stop us and it shouldn't ever stop anyone, because critics are only the people who can't get a record deal themselves.

It's logical that people from bad times will reflect their feelings in their communication. Music is part of the communication. If you lived it, you can do it.

I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.

But I think I know just as many creative people who've never taken drugs in their life as I do who have taken a lot of drugs.

I'm trying to make something every time that feels new and surprises people. Hopefully at least one person. But it's not like I turn it off. I don't make a movie and then go back to my normal life. When I'm finishing one movie the next day I'm thinking about the next one.

Music gives the soul this inner self-expression, a voice. It gives the soul a sound, the sound of the Muse.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

I can be most colorful and inventive when I am angry.

I have always thought of poetry as an act of celebration. Just by nature of writing a poem you are taking the time to dwell on whatever it is that you're writing about...you can be celebrating anger, you can be celebrating sorrow... you are spending the time to focus and observe and try to understand the various parts of being human.

Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.

It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.

I know society these days, I know people are wanting to find everything they can to pick things apart, but I have to write from my heart and my experiences, and I fully own them. Those are mine to share.

It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

As far as people communicating with each other well I think that listening is important. You know really trying to read between the lines of what some body is saying and trying to read their mind a little bit where there at because most people don't really say what they're feeling. Which is the bones of great literature.

Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.

I was going to be a teacher and improve the world. Teach people with hooks for hands to fingerpaint, and teach bums to draw happy faces on beads.