Walter Becker Quotes

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

The Cube is, at the same time, a symbol of simplicity and complexity.

I've always been into super upbeat, cute, uplifting progressions, but at the same time, I'm also a very dark person. I really like both sides, and I feel like I'm always trying to find some middle ground with music or style or anything that I do.

Sad music, I always thought, is more beautiful than other music. But at the same time, I am in my personal life a very happy guy. I have a sense of humor. I am not the kind of depressed guy all the time brooding. No. I am very enthusiastic about things.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.

I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do.

I like characters who have two different things going on, whether it is Robin from 'Top Of The Lake' having that strength juxtaposed with the vulnerability and being in pain, or whether it is Peggy from 'Mad Men' with her naivety and her sort of idiocy at times, combined with her intelligence and courage really to do what she did at that time.

'Nice Guys' has darkness in it and parts that are kind of odd, but there are also parts where it's heartfelt and soulful. You can switch back and forth.

I love it that my father is such a classical musician and such a traditionalist, and at the same time has had a wild life and a crazy time.

You have to laugh at things in order to let them be what they truly are. Because nothing is only sad. Nothing is only funny. There's context to all of those things.

I want to do things or write things that make people feel a bit more beautiful or tragic or something because there are so many other things than just funny.

I think people have a hard time dealing with a bunch of things at once. They can't have something be disturbing and funny at the same time. They can't have that kind of combination. Which is weird to me because I feel complicated about most things.

I like Feist's music because it's really smart, but it's really free and soulful at the same time. Sometimes you only get one or the other.

There's something in the German language that makes you feel like you're getting a hug and a backstab at the same time.

The more songs I've written, the more I've grown interested in telling a story. When I first began, I had this list of opaque phrases where you can make of it what you want.

When I write a song, I want to write something that is really catchy and says something that might actually touch somebody.

I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate.

I like things that are over the top and subtle at the same time.

The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer.

You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.

A lot of my paintings have quite negative meanings, but painted in a bright and cheerful way.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.