Henry Rollins Quotes

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

I've seen and learned enough to keep my music fresh and spread out.

I feel that when you care about your music, taking risks is something you should do to keep things exciting.

If you're not changing what you're doing and exploring different parts of your musical output, I think you're slowly dying.

And it's been a process of digging through the songs and trying to make them born on stage again. I think they are very different. I think they come off very differently. I think they come off, I don't know if it's masculine or outward, extroverted than introverted. I didn't know. It's just been a process.

There's a thin line between interesting music and self-indulgence. We crossed it on the Passengers record.

I think most musicians know if they make the same record twice, even if they say they don't.

My hope is to continue to make new music and go with the flow. I think I'll always be creative. I want to keep making good music, put myself into positions where I need to rise to the occasion of playing in front of an audience, and continually get better at what I'm doing.

I think '60s are appealing to creative people, because it seemed to be a time of endless possibilities, when the boundaries of what could be considered popular culture were being expanded almost by the week. It doesn't feel like that anymore. At times, I wish it were so. Radio is a perfect example; good God, I mean, back then the most interesting songs were also hits, and that's just not true anymore. It hasn't been true in a long time.

Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.

I love musicals but it's very, very different. It's really just a different form than serious drama, and has very different rules and a completely different set of characters and requirements and ambitions. It maybe shouldn't be as separate as it is, but it's got a different history. In terms of serious drama, I think you'd have to say that you could break it down essentially into the narrative realist tradition and experimental theater.

As a director you want to have actors, not only surpassing themselves, but also going somewhere, going different places.

I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role, because, of course, it's really not me. I'm finding a new way. I don't know what it's going to be. But I know that I will need to give it to people one day.

I think Jim [Carrey], in the best possible way, thought, "I need to do different things to establish to the audience that I'm not going to do the same thing every time."

It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

Sometimes I have compared myself with a scientist or something: when you discover something and you don't expect the whole world to understand it. I always thought I was doing that kind of activity, in art and in music too.

I hope to die right in the middle of a song and right on the stage doing what I love to do. I hope to be about 120 when that happens.

Live shows are where I can just go off, I do the most. I can recreate songs live and take one element and build on that that for like 40 minutes and I like seeing people's faces when I'm making something live.

I love playing our older songs along with newer ones but If all I have is my old stuff, I quit. Creating is more rewarding.

Some people think a song without words isn't a real song. Tell that to Beethoven and he'll kick your ass!