Sufjan Stevens Quotes

I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

When you don't know what the band looks like, it puts the emphasis on thinking and taking the music and message more seriously.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

That's my favorite part about songwriting, the way you write a song, and someone else might hear it a different way.

Cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.

I personally don't think of the music as being particularly dark, though many seem to disagree as I often have to answer that question. I try and make the Lustmord sound have a real mass and a tangible presence, which some choose to interpret as dark. It's an interesting distinction. Although there are dark elements interwoven within the whole, it's only one of many textures.

So if somebody writes a song that appears to have some meaning then everybody thinks that it's a really heavy song.

I think artists are going to express things from an emotional point of view, that's their job, to suggest and interpret, and report what they witness. That's their job as artists, you're looking for the rub, where's the rub, you're a storyteller, you're looking for the rub, not necessarily the solutions, or you're not necessarily educated, you're not the winner of a debate contest, a national debate contest, you're not necessarily a person who has a doctorate in anything.

The world I grew up in had both a literal and mythological quality. We were on the borders of several worlds - the larger black world bordered us on one side. More distantly, there was the larger white world. We interacted with some, but not others. If you think of it as an internal geography, it is a land, a contested space with these very charged historical, cultural, and emotional borders.

Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

It might be a good idea to have government totally by the people - that each person takes four or five hours of the week doing some kind of government job - in other words, along with what you do you also help maintain the government so no one person has total control - I might go down to an office for four hours and do whatever I'm capable of doing - writing out receipts for food distribution in a certain area - but it's all actually a monstrous secretarial job and that's all I think it should be.

I'm against ignorance. I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.

Steve Jobs did not start started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist.

I think the press is doing a wonderful job of putting the pressure on the decision-makers in Hollywood to support more female directors.

My father passed away before he saw me perform. I can't help but wonder what he would think of all this. I go to a job in full makeup.

As a fiction writer you train yourself to think about situations subjectively. I don't really care for narratives that are just A, B, C, D, and then E. I like the aura that fiction has, how it can conjure up dream imagery. It's a sort of emotional speculation that you can shape and work with.

If I worked at White Globe Consulting, I wouldn't be able to do my job. I would spend all day texting the other people in the office, asking them what was going on today and had they heard anything new and what did they think was going to happen. Hmm. Maybe it's a good thing I'm not in an office job.

The rules may seem obvious but when you think about them they're not. For somebody who has my job they're not as obvious as one would think.

I tried my hand at writing, I tried to write out a little script - and it's not too bad. Mostly, though, it let me understand how incredibly difficult that job is. I can't even imagine doing it on a weekly basis for a series in any way. That's tough. I think I'll try to leave that to smarter people than me.