Top 50 Jeff Buckley Quotes

I don’t see people. I don’t see men and women at all. When I see them, I see… their mothers and fathers. I see how old they are inside. Like when I look at the president, or anybody in a record company, or a store owner, I may see a little boy behind the counter with the face of an old man. And that’s who I talk to.

Critics try to pin so many different inaccuracies on me and my music; they look at the complicated things and try to simplify them. They think they can nail your whole life down just by knowing the bare bones of your history in partaking in 10 minutes of conversation.

I don’t want to do any more covers. It’s good to learn to make things your own, but the education’s over. ‘Grace’ is putting a lot of things to rest.

To young to hold on and to old to just break free and run.

Words are really beautiful, but they’re limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there’s nothing to hang onto. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is.

Thinking so hard on her soft eyes and memories of the signs that it’s over. It’s over.

There are times when what you do will be mysterious to everyone… times when you have to change directions before people are ready. Just because someone does something that critics don’t like or understand doesn’t mean you’re failing as a musician. It probably means you’re growing.

Life’s too short and too complicated for people behind desks, people behind masks to be ruining other people’s lives, initiating force against other people’s lives on the basis of their income, their color, their class, their religious beliefs, whatever.

Maybe I’m not a good enough artist that people just think of me. Maybe in the future, I’ll bloom into something that will just make people look at me for what I am.

I figured if I played in the no-man’s land of intimacy, I would learn to be a performer.

I’m far from being a consummate artist. I mean, this is just my first album, and the work is very new. I’m just beginning, and I’m certainly not worthy of demigod status. There’s absolutely no danger of me reaching that.

I’ve already created my own thing.

I’m convinced part of the reason I got signed is because of who I am, and it makes me sad.

I’m convinced I got signed because of who I am. And it makes me sad.

Critics… They’re like traffic cops. They say what they have to say, then leave, and another guy moves in ,and he has his say – and it’s often just the opposite. The result is either critical acclaim or critical murder, and neither has any bearing on my music or direction.

The only goal is in the process. The process is in the thing with little flashes of light: those are the gigs, the live shows… it’s the life in between. That’s all I’ve got.

I’ve always liked the electric guitar better. Even though the acoustic can be a very sexy and mysterious instrument, I can go to way more places with an electric.

When I sing, my face changes shape. It feels like my skull changes shape… the bones bend.

When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I’d always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we’d, like, ‘wanna go against the norm, man.’

Certain emotions just take you to the notes – being furious, heroic, sad, erotic, when rain comes.

Grace is a quality in people that I just enjoy. It’s a very human quality.

‘Grace’ is basically a death prayer. Not something of sorrow, but of just casting away any fear of death. No relief will come – you really just have to stew in your life until it’s time to go. But sometimes, somebody else’s faith in you can do wonders.

I don’t know any artists that are really emotionally well adjusted. In fact, I think we’re all pretty much insane.

Maybe someday, I’ll just make, like, a complete on-demand record that everybody wants to hear. But that would be impossible and, also, I just changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll ever do that.

I don’t see myself in an ivory tower.

The music business is the most childish business in the world. Nobody knows what they’re selling or why, but they sell it if it works.

If you’re going to write, then write a novel with a Haitian woman in it and try and describe her accurately. When you can do that, you can write about people.

I don’t really go on what people say so much; I go on their voice. I go on their energy at the time. I go on how close their arms are folded into their chest.

I disoriented myself from everything about being a human being and just played and played and played and sang and sang and sang.

More than any other place, New York is where I felt I belonged. I prefer the Lower East Side to any place on the planet. I can be who I am there, and I couldn’t do that anywhere I lived as a child. I never fit in when I lived in California, even though that’s where my roots are.

I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I’d always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13.

My personal aesthetic is to be affected directly by everything about what you’re seeing… I don’t mind being dashed on the rocks… My most base act of defiance is to live a long time and still rock.

The Smiths hasn’t been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.

I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that’s censorship.

What I’m trying to do is just sing what comes to my body in the context of the song. And if you go by the emotion of the song, it’s almost like stepping into a city. Cities have certain customs and rules and laws you can break, and that’s what I was doing.

A song just doesn’t have verse-chorus-verse. It could just be one line. There are Chinese love songs that you have to learn one melody for a three-minute thing, and nothing ever repeats. I like that.

I once tried to sing jazz for real. But jazz didn’t do it for me. You can’t have jazz without a jazz world, which doesn’t exist anymore.

When I was 12, I decided to become a musician. ‘Physical Graffiti’ was the first album I ever owned.

Kiss me out of desire, but not consolation.

I’ve always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content of a song lies. Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience.

The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.

I think that all people are many people. I think all people have many, many, many different souls inside, and they just shift from one to the other.

The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.

You can tell everything from the eyes.

There are thousands of great artists that wouldn’t be doing the same kind of work if there were no music business machine. The ones who are popular would be doing much different work, too. Michael Bolton would be pumping gas.

I’m actually the son of Mary Guibert. My mother was born in the Panama Canal zone and came to America when she was five with my grandmother and grandfather, and that was the family I knew. Everybody sang; everybody had songs all the time, and they loved music.

Maybe I’m too young to keep good love from going wrong, but tonight you’re on my mind, so you never know.

On my record cover, you can barely see my face. I still think I look really geeky.

Music was like my first real toy. I was an only child for a while, and I was alone a lot of the time – and I liked it. I still like being alone.

All music industry places are the same, really. They have the same dynamics and the same concerns and the same needs.