Michael Stipe Quotes

I think often sadness is a great place to get songs from.

Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.

There's a sadness to the human condition that I think music is good for. It gives a counterpoint to the visual beauty, and adds depth to pictures that they wouldn't have if the music wasn't there.

Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.

And what I love about music and art in general is that you can take something so negative or positive - any emotion, no matter how sad or happy - and turn it into art.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

I love sad. Sadness makes you feel more than anything.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

Go ahead and play the blues if it'll make you happy.

I always prefer to write songs about emotional situations and heartbreak because I like getting into the character.

We all like stories that make us cry. It's so nice to feel sad when you've nothing in particular to feel sad about.

I'm a songwriter who's put my childhood memories and teenage angst into songs.

We had our unhappy moments but they got channelled into the kind of sadness that was necessary for singing a song about going nowhere. So it worked out very well I think.

I'm such an emotional person that when it comes to songwriting, I can click into whatever zone I need.

I don't have any problem with being the guy whose album people put on when they're feeling sad.

I don't think that my music without pain is good music - and I wouldn't know, because I haven't made any music without pain.

Music is just where I sort of write my emotions down.

Music can make you go from sadness to an immense sadness. There is a limit; if you go too far, it becomes schmaltzy.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

I think any music of any worth has been done by people who were very interested in the internal process of their soul and their mind that's taking place while they're writing music.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can't get rid of. Sometimes there's an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you.