Top 45 Arlo Parks Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Arlo Parks Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I've always been a very emotional person and as a child

I’ve always been a very emotional person and as a child. I guess writing felt like something that I could do in private to process things.
Arlo Parks
My attention span was quite short and I just wanted to use a lot of beautiful words. When I read a poem like ‘Howl’, or ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath, I felt myself being moved – I wanted to do that for other people.
Arlo Parks
When I was growing up, there weren’t that many queer girls of colour making music. So I just wanted to be able to exist, just to be that, without putting too much emphasis on it.
Arlo Parks
I really like Pat Parker. I really like Audre Lorde. I read a lot of the Beats when I was younger, so Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder. I’ve been discovering a lot more modern poems as well.
Arlo Parks
When I was younger, music really saved me, and felt like a refuge for me when I was in quite a lost space. I just want to talk to people, and I guess in a way, feel understood myself.
Arlo Parks
I went to see my first gig when I was 15 – it was Loyle Carner at Shepherd’s Bush – and I remember just feeling the bass in my feet and in my body. I was so energised.
Arlo Parks
I would say I’m an outlier. Nobody in my family does anything creative, though my dad loved jazz and my mum likes Prince and 1980s French pop.
Arlo Parks
It sounds cheesy to say it, but I think my motivation has always been to help others.
Arlo Parks
Reading the dictionary helps me express myself better. I can spend hours flicking through a thesaurus, too. It’s not about expanding my vocabulary, it’s just that I have a very specific taste with words. I’ll sit and write lists of them to help me better describe my life.
Arlo Parks
When I was younger, there was that desire to be cool and to fit in and to look a certain way. And I was quite an introverted kid who wrote plays in her spare time, so I didn’t feel very cool.
Arlo Parks
When you approach the world with such vulnerability and openness, people return that energy. It’s draining, but it fills me with a purpose. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Arlo Parks
The way that I write is very instinctual and based off raw feeling–I’m a very emotional person and I think that comes across in my writing. Also the songwriting that I enjoy, for example Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen and Nico tend to be both photographic and visceral.
Arlo Parks
My dad loved jazz, so there was a little Miles Davis, Otis Redding, Donny Hathaway. My mum is French, so she’d listen to a lot of French music, but a lot of the music that actually formed my taste, I just found online.
Arlo Parks
I picked up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15 maybe, and then I started just messing around with loops on GarageBand, and just building my own beats in my bedroom and then just releasing that on SoundCloud.
Arlo Parks
You can tell when a song has come from the heart and is genuine, and it moves you more when you can tell the person really feels what they’re saying.
Arlo Parks
I realised that what I loved was descriptive writing rather than something with a plot.
Arlo Parks
When I first started writing in the beginning, it was very much surrounding the idea of escape and of fantasy, then when I got a little bit older it very much became a way of looking inward.
Arlo Parks
I realised that being sensitive means you can connect to all kinds of people. I think I’ve learned that it is a gift as well.
Arlo Parks
As I’m writing a song, I focus on the music and try not to let my mind wander too much, but if I do think of any visual moments or references that I think would connect nicely, I’ll make a note of it.
Arlo Parks
When I started making my own music I was listening to people like Erykah Badu and Elliott Smith. I think I always gravitated towards slightly more understated voices because it felt like I could really connect with what they were saying. It felt more like a conversation.
Arlo Parks
When things started to take off, I had more and more to do, and things were happening but I didn’t quite have the time to process it or enjoy the positives and think about how far I’ve come.
Arlo Parks
There’s nothing that compares to actually being in a room and having that sense of collective experience, feeling the music in your body and having all these people around you.
Arlo Parks
It’s important to have a moment where you just stop and look at where you came from.
Arlo Parks
I wanted to really delve into the idea of reckoning with difficult things in one’s past – and celebrating the joyful things, and honoring the stories that have made me who I am.
Arlo Parks
I write from a personal perspective, but sometimes seeing something in the street like that will spark something that reminds me of my own experiences.
Arlo Parks
I asked a lot of my artist friends and just friends in general what their favorite albums of all time were. I made this massive list and I just listened to all of them, all the way through.
Arlo Parks
Know that you can move past things that have happened to you and that healing takes time. Take the lessons you learned in the past and hold them close, but move forward and try not to get trapped in what was.
Arlo Parks
Sometimes I’m just giving, and giving to people who aren’t always deserving. But I’ve learned to listen and approach people without judgment. I’ve had so many conversations with so many different kinds of people – it’s opened my heart, which is useful when I’m writing songs.
Arlo Parks
I was writing short stories aged seven or eight. I had a vivid, overactive imagination.
Arlo Parks
It’s a very strange thing to suddenly be approached in the street and have streams of messages, and not know how to work through getting bad reviews and hate comments. It’s something that can really weigh on the mind and be quite isolating.
Arlo Parks
There are so many individuals. We’re not going to all have the same ways of being or priorities or personalities. You can’t have this umbrella thing. Even if you look at other artists my age, people are making completely different music and have different goals.
Arlo Parks
To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the wo

To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the world around you, you need to be curious, you need to listen, you need to be willing to learn from people. A lot of great art is about people being moved by something or seeing something that stops them dead.
Arlo Parks
Yeah, it can be dangerous to kind of try and target your art to a certain type of people! You don’t know who’s going to gravitate towards your work, you never know what people are going get out of the work. So I try and just create music that feels true to my taste, and then see what happens.
Arlo Parks
Most of my songs are based off poetry, but I mainly write to write. I never know which form the words are best suited to until I hear an instrumental.
Arlo Parks
But I think for me, writing poetry when I was younger really helped me to condense an idea or a story into only so many words, because in a song you really only have three, four minutes to have a complete world in this song, so I think it definitely taught me to be concise.
Arlo Parks
All of my songs are so hyper-specific – that they can seem universal is a beautiful thing.
Arlo Parks
I’ve always felt very connected to people.
Arlo Parks
To me, nature is so inspiring – that sense of constant change, the way things are cleansed or washed away, and it’s beyond your control.
Arlo Parks
How many artists to pick as my obsessions? The four I listen to all the time are Phoebe Bridgers, A Tribe Called Quest – I’m being very selective, here – and then probably the Cure, still; and then The Internet – I love The Internet.
Arlo Parks
I’m up around 11am to my alarm. Without it I’d sleep into the afternoon.
Arlo Parks
I’m quite a dreamy person but I’m also very realistic about my possibilities, so if this was meant to remain a hobby I would have kept it as that. But I feel like music goes in waves and when you get an upward swing, you have to push it as far as you can.
Arlo Parks
I really wanted to have a name that was double-barreled. I think at the time I was listening to a lot of Odd Future – like Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean – and I wanted my name to have a ring to it.
Arlo Parks
I make sure to sit down for at least five minutes a day to just capture whatever passes through my mind.
Arlo Parks
When you start doing music as your job and there are so many peripheral things around it, it’s great to have a reminder to focus on what is good for myself, my body, my health and my work.
Arlo Parks
I learned a lot of empathy and openness from my parents. I know so many people who don’t have that experience.
Arlo Parks