Musicians From The United States

"You think that you're on the brink? The shit hasn't even begun to hit the fan."

"It seems as though I'm going nowhere really fucking fast."

"Will I ever get to where I'm going? If I do, will I know when I'm there? If the wind blew me in the right direction, Would I even care? I would."

"Maybe if I looked in my heart, I could find a back door."

"the day you were born, you were born free. That is your privilege."

"I'm born, I'm alive, I breathe, In a moment or two I realize, That the sphere upon which I reside Is asleep on its feet, Should I go back to sleep?"

"Your tangerine of electricity is ripe and on a vine!"

"Society must let the artist go, to wander off into their nebula."

"When we get there, We're going to fly so far away Making sure to laugh while we experience Anti-gravity."

"Too bad the things that make you mad are my favorite things."

"You've been raised in limitation, but that glove never fit quite right."

"I think I grew a grey watching you procrastinate!"

"Can someone please explain to me your ever-present lack of speed?"

"You act as if there's blinders on your eyes!"

"You can't make me think like you, mundane."

"On the surface you hate, but you know you need me."

"I'm sick of limiting myself to fit your definition."

"Imagine your brain as a canister filled with ink, Now think of your body as the pen where the ink resides. Fuse the two - Kapow! What are you now? You're the human magic marker, won't you please surprise my eyes?"

"In my opinion, so much of it is really about what you had in mind when you got into it: was it only that you wanted to be a rockstar and see your name in lights? I never really had those kinds of dreams. I knew I loved music and I knew that when I sang in a certain way it made my chest and my whole stomach tickle and I liked it. It still does that same thing to me; I know I’m doing it right when it makes my core tingle a little bit. I get the same feeling when I’m painting a picture or when I get into that almost hypnotic state of writing – those things are incredible and those are the kinds of things that attract me to creativity."

"I need a new pair of shoes : I need a new shiny car : I need to buy until I fry : I can not name what I'm trying to : I want my cock an inch bigger : I want new, flawless tits : I'm not enough as I was made, please complete my partial mind : I want my money back, this product has a hole."

"To think that one's actions could please the masses is indeed a notion bound in irony; someone will inevitably find something wrong in almost everything. So do what it is that you do best and remember to have enough tolerance for two."

"I think perhaps love thrives on unlikely circumstance and chance : life thrives on these principles, and is life not love? And love not life?"

"I was on an airplane last year when a talk show began playing on the TVs. I decided to start narrating for the people, which is a really great game if you're ever bored enough. I realized a time will probably come when television will watch us if we're watching it, if that hasn't already happened, figuratively or literally. It sounded like some sort of pseudo-Big Brother nightmare, so I wrote it down."

"Lyrically speaking, I know that there were a lot of things going on in and around the world and there were some very specific people in my mind coming dangerously close to having megolomaniacal tendancies and so I did my best to write those thoughts down.""

"I attribute a scab to the present state of society. The way the scab looks in its worst state is gross and chaotic and horrible, that's now, but when it breaks away, there's a brand new piece of skin that's stronger than before. It's like creation out of chaos."

"I was in a bookstore, browsing through an old Life magazine, when I saw a picture of what the article called spontaneous human combustion. There were an old guy's legs and shoes, perfectly intact...then, right around his knee area, was just a pile of charred ashes. I was going through some turmoil in my life, both good and bad, and the image struck a chord, so...I wrote a song about it."

"If I forgot some stuff, please excuse me; I ate the brown acid at Woodstock '69 and can scarcely remember my own name."

"Jose just got a tattoo of an ass tattooed on his ass the other day. It's actually quite fascinating. Confusing, but fascinating. When you come to the show, ask him about it. He'll show you."

"Morning View is I think collectively probably our favorite record that we have made as a band because it was the most effortless... um... in its conception... you know? It was a lot less slaving over parts and trying to just get together in this big beautiful room with a view of the ocean and parts and sounds and melodies and lyrics would just happen... they would just sort of spill out of us without us really trying... so to me that's sort of the most amazing way to write music or do any kind of art, which is by letting it happen... but one of the most important parts in any sort of.. uh... journey so to speak.. Is uh... the ride... and we've had a really good time riding to where ever it is we are going... and I don't even think any of us know particularly where it is going to take us... But it's been really fun sort of chasing it."

"When we're making music together, it's like five men making love-in a very platonic sense. It's very erotic, because your spirits are intermingling, you're becoming one. It's also why it can get so heated. You're tapping into this electricity that's very primal."

"We don't know much about him. We do know that he came from a sperm meeting an egg. Actually, his name is Charles Mulholland. We don't know what he does, but he sure looks like he knows something."

"I learned from a very young age that if I pursued the things that truly excited me, that they would reward in more important ways, like happiness"

"Men have a lot less to write about, unless you're somebody like Tom Waits or John Lennon. And the female voice is much more suited to melody. Men have this barky thing-we're domesticated apes with a microphone."

"Female artists are the perfect example of a creator: They know how to make life and art with their bodies. Life comes from their bodies, so on a very basic level, they have more to write about."

"The girl I find who wants to talk about quantum theory in a bar is the one I want to marry."

"She is a girl so I wouldn’t slap her. I would lock her in a room full of spiders and let her think about what she’s doing to the youth of America."

"We have all the elements of being the worst band in the world: a bass player who’s got some slap-bass shit, heavy riff guitars, a DJ scratching on the songs, a crazy drummer, and a singer who’s in touch with his feminine side. Even our band name is the worst name ever: it evokes imagery of ‘Incubus’ in death-metal writing, with bullet belts across our chests."

"Many errors, a little rightness."

"Pound's fascism-crazed mind"

"Pound's ideas about Russian communism developed in two directions. First, he felt that there were basic similarities between the Russian and the fascist revolutions. Second, he felt a great deal of admiration for Lenin as a man of action in the mold of his hero, Mussolini (this was not an entirely accidental comparison, for the contemporary figure most admired by Mussolini was Lenin)."

"Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few."

"A musician once asked Ezra Pound if there was anywhere one could get all of poetry, in the sense that one could get all of music in Bach. Pound's response was that if a person would take the trouble really to learn Greek, he could get all of it, or nearly all of it, in Homer."

"I have been very excited by Ezra Pound's work with Chinese. People don't realize how much of Chinese culture is part of American culture. I mean, all those transcendentalists at the beginning of American writing."

"Personally I admire several writers (Céline, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency of a poet. I never listened to Pound’s broadcasts, but I often read them in the B.B.C. Monitoring Reports, and they were intellectually and morally disgusting. Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences."

"Chinese poetry, as we know it today, is something invented by Ezra Pound."

"His intelligence indeed has been a flowering of Western self‐awareness, with life‐bestowing and poisonous blossoms intermingled, as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest in it."

"Hence "the serious artist," whom Pound describes in an early essay as the maintainer of the mental health of the state, has concerns identical with the serious philosopher, the serious ruler, the serious editor or publisher, the serious teacher. He keeps up values."

"Real education must ultimately be limited to one who INSISTS on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding."

"AT ABOUT THIS POINT the weak-hearted reader usually sits down in the road, removes his shoes and weeps that he 'is a bad linguist' or that he or she can't possibly learn all those languages. One has to divide the readers who want to be experts from those who do not, and divide, as it were, those who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF IT THEY LIVE IN."

"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."