61+ Sufjan Stevens Quotes On Death, Egypt And Tour

Sufjan Stevens is an American singer-songwriter from Detroit, Michigan. He is known for his introspective and lyrically complex indie folk music. He has released a wide range of albums, including the critically acclaimed Illinois and Carrie & Lowell. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sufjan Stevens on love, death, egypt.

Top 10 Sufjan Stevens Quotes

1. A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.
2. Love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.
3. I like residing in abstraction.
4. I've always been a visual person, I'm formerly a graphic designer. I've always seen myself as an observer. I like to maintain objectivity and don't get too intimately involved in my subjects.
5. Tuesday night at the Bible study we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens.
6. Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.
7. There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.
8. I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there.
9. I want to throw my voice more, I want to manipulate melody more... I want to be less deliberate and mechanical... I want less melody.
10. I've been working a lot on figuring out how to sing differently and better. I want to become a better singer. I want to sing out more. I want to me more extroverted, vocally.

Sufjan Stevens Short Quotes

• We live in a world that is cruel to the earth itself. Man is a biological terrorist.
• We stayed a long, long time, to see you, to meet you, to see you at last.
• I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.
• Art is... a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.
• When I live, I'll give it all I've got.
• An imaginary baby is so much easier than a real baby. No diapers to change.
• I think musicians should stay off television generally.

Sufjan Stevens Quotes About Love

I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith. — Sufjan Stevens

My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small. — Sufjan Stevens

All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start. — Sufjan Stevens

I’ve never known a man who loved me. — Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens Famous Quotes And Sayings

I'm a very self-conscious person, I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances, it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise. — Sufjan Stevens

Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes. — Sufjan Stevens

I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects. — Sufjan Stevens

Some of my music requires an obsessive-compulsive approach and a real embodiment of excessiveness. So I really have to live in that world of overstimulation. Sometimes I think it's like a drug; more is more, and you can never get enough. The older I get, the more I crave that excessive aesthetic. It's never going to satisfy me. — Sufjan Stevens

The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the US. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last. — Sufjan Stevens

I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all. — Sufjan Stevens

One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk. — Sufjan Stevens

The Internet is just one big gossip chamber - that's why it's so fascinating and entertaining. It's a fabulous platform for superficial communication. — Sufjan Stevens

The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment. — Sufjan Stevens

Growing up on the border there, we were always frustrated with people's pronunciations of towns in Michigan, and people mispronouncing Illinois. There are all these Native American words that no one really knows how to pronounce. — Sufjan Stevens

Yes, the kingdom of Christianity and the Church has been one of the most destructive forces in history, and there are levels of bastardization of religious beliefs. But the unique thing about Christianity is that it is so amorphous and not reductive to culture or place or anything. It's extremely malleable. — Sufjan Stevens

If there's any kind of morality, for me, it's about reality; what is reality? I have a hard time distinguishing what is valuable when it comes to the real world and the fantasy world. Like, should I invest my time in the ordinary world or the imaginary world? — Sufjan Stevens

It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog. — Sufjan Stevens

I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks. — Sufjan Stevens

There's a sense of urgency in understanding that your body is not really your own. We can control it to a certain extent through habits and good behavior, but there's so much we don't have control of. — Sufjan Stevens

I've always been obsessed with electronics and using computers and software. It's always been part of my vernacular. — Sufjan Stevens

I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener. — Sufjan Stevens

The Internet is manic. It's very strange. I don't think it's healthy. They should outlaw posting comments! It's a bummer to go somewhere to get information or buy tickets and you encounter profanity everywhere you go. — Sufjan Stevens

I was feeling privileged and self-conscious about my life as a musician, which feels self-absorbed. I can't help it, I am a musician. This is what I do. — Sufjan Stevens

I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don't think my music would speak to those people. I don't even want those people to hear what I'm doing. — Sufjan Stevens

It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell. — Sufjan Stevens

There's nothing cutting edge about what I'm trying to do. I'm not creating a new sound. I'm not like Bjork, who's an alien from another world. I'm of the earth. You could extract any measure of music out of anything I've ever done and you could find its affiliations in music history. — Sufjan Stevens

I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could. — Sufjan Stevens

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are. — Sufjan Stevens

That's really where my heart is, unfortunately - I'm less interested in songwriting and more into just making noise. — Sufjan Stevens

My only concern about art collaborations is that I never thought of myself as an Artist. My tax forms say Musician/Songwriter. — Sufjan Stevens

The round-up is an aggressive tradition. I'm trying to objectively be a steward of the tradition and what it means in its choreography. — Sufjan Stevens

I quickly learned that you don't have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life. — Sufjan Stevens

Pro Tools is an incredible resource. I think it's enabled me to do things that I wouldn't have been able to do without this kind of computer editing. — Sufjan Stevens

I think that music has always been restricted to media. The LP is an antiquated form, and the CD is now an antiquated form, and there's no sense grieving. Music is forever, there will always be songs. It's exciting that we're not limited to the media any more. I don't hold a precious view of my work, that it exists outside of social constructs or the confines of a platform. — Sufjan Stevens

I have a lot of friends who have hula-hoops, it's like a mixture of dance and athletics and exercise, meditation. It's a healthy hobby I think. I can do a few tricks, I can hoop from my neck and shoulders, and I can do a few moves, a few tricks! I can walk through the hoop whilst it's spinning. I feel like there's definitely an interest in promoting the hula-hoop as an important pastime! — Sufjan Stevens

I'm not beholden to the public, and neither are the public beholden to me or my songs. I'm very much of a populist on those terms, I believe that the song is no longer mine anyway. I like to process the dispossession that happens when you play something live. I don't have a clue as to how these songs are going to plan out, whether they're going to be on a record. I don't know yet. — Sufjan Stevens

I'm from the generation that's always been recording, from the very beginning. I learned to play the guitar on the four-track. I started listening to music at a time when people were doing recording at home, when the discussion about songwriting correlated to the discussion about producing and engineering. I think that's a description of my generation. — Sufjan Stevens

There is nothing more incredible and moving and appealing than good music, and it cannot always be reduced to a story, to exposition. It's so much more abstract and brilliant. — Sufjan Stevens

Life is all about toiling and labor. But obviously I get great joy in confronting challenge and taking risk. — Sufjan Stevens

My Dad used to say that the balance of the world relied on all of the monks who were living outside of society in creative isolation. I don't quite understand the ascetic life or the private life or the monastic private life. But I definitely understand privacy's value. — Sufjan Stevens

It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist. — Sufjan Stevens

I'm terrified of just being myself because I think it's boring. I know who I really am and I think it's boring. — Sufjan Stevens

I'm no longer beholden to the sacredness of the recorded song as some kind of ultimate standard by which every performance of the song is measured. I like to diversify, that there are multiple versions of every song. And the songs incorporate a lot of improvisation, and an element of chance, and I think that's exciting. There's no one true formulation of a song, they have various manifestations depending on the space we're in. I like that. — Sufjan Stevens

Fiction has always been a thorn in my side, because I've always wanted to be a writer but I can't seem to really do it. — Sufjan Stevens

Life Lessons by Sufjan Stevens

1. Sufjan Stevens teaches us to use our creativity to explore different musical styles and genres, allowing us to express our emotions and feelings in a unique and personal way.
2. He also encourages us to be open to collaboration, as he has worked with many different artists and producers to create his music.
3. Lastly, Sufjan Stevens encourages us to stay true to ourselves and our art, no matter how difficult it may be.