Top 77 Conor Oberst Quotes

I try to make all my songs good. I don’t ever write one to finish one. A lot of protest songs end up that way, driven by some kind of emotional response.

The only thing major labels can really offer is money.

I keep my eyes closed a lot when I’m singing because sometimes it’s distracting to see people.

A boycott is, inherently, a blunt instrument. It is an imperfect weapon, a carpet bomb, when all involved would prefer a surgical strike.

I’m a real music fan, so I listen to all kinds of music all the time. I listen to a lot of what my friends or people I know are listening to. I’m always checking out new bands.

The worst thing you can do as an artist is to repeat yourself.

I like the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. I love how it’s been rained on forever and looks worn down by time.

Movement has been one of the few constants in my life, and I always feel a great sense of optimism when I set off to a new place.

Once you realize that everyone is in the same boat, that everyone is just as insecure and childlike as everyone else, that all these jokers in D.C. ruining our world are just greedy kids grabbing for marbles – I think that realization means you’re an adult.

When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that’s what you’re going to do.

Although Omaha is my birthplace and the place I grew up, I don’t see myself spending extended amounts of time there. I feel almost more comfortable and more at peace in New York.

They say it’s better to bury your sadness in a graveyard or garden that waits for the spring to wake from its sleep and burst into green.

I’ve always been slightly preoccupied with death or whatever those kind of silly big questions people will tell you to not spend your time worrying about.

I was raised Catholic, and I have an aversion to anyone who takes religion to the extreme.

In theory, I always think I should totally go back to school, because I don’t want to start sinking slowly… I want to learn, blah blah blah. Then I think about actually going and sitting in classes and, man, it sounds terrible.

I think that, with anything creative, you should have the freedom to experiment, and that experimentation means not feeling totally responsible for how other people perceive it.

I think we should be pushing for amnesty and a path to citizenship for every undocumented person residing in the United States who has not committed a violent crime, with a special emphasis on keeping families together.

There’s a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions.

The first music I ever got into was the ’80s alternative bands that my brother listened to, like The Cure and The Smiths and R.E.M. and Fugazi. I can remember specifically saying The Cure was my favorite band back in second grade.

I’ve been part of running a label since I was a kid, so I understand how it works. But the more and more I learn about it, the less and less interested I am in it.

No lies, just love.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it’s going to get dull, it never really does.

We’ve all seen the power music has to spread messages of solidarity and hope.

We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul.

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

I kind of go in waves with reading. Sometimes I read all the time, and sometimes I can’t get settled enough to focus.

If there’s a criticism of ‘Cassadaga’ that I agreed with, it’s that we left things in the oven too long, that songs were overstuffed, with too many ideas competing for space.

I’ve cried, and you’d think I’d be better for it, but the sadness just sleeps, and it stays in my spine the rest of my life.

On good days, I can see the inherent goodness in people, and that human beings have a high capacity to learn and adapt. But things like the environment, nuclear weapons and ideas like peak oil – if you think about them too much, they can really freak you out.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we’re never going to know what the full picture is.

One of my favorite modern American authors is Denis Johnson. I’m deeply inspired by all of his work – I rip him off constantly.

I think there are some songs that stand the test of time better than others for sure. I think some songs go out of favour; I’ll get sick of a song for a while, and I won’t play it; then it’ll make a comeback.

So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

You can only really understand good if you have bad, so the idea of heaven or anything that happens for eternity, even if it’s nice, I can’t imagine it being nice forever. Even the idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it’s kind of a nice thing to say, you know.

I have many friends who are both Mexican and Mexican-American and others who, I guess you would say, are somewhere in between. The ironic thing is that all three of those categories often exist inside of the same family.

If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing… one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand.

I have a car in Nebraska. When I bought it, they gave me a satellite radio, and there’s an ‘indie-rock’ station. It’s just nothing I’m interested in.

Art is basically communication, and I think everyone who’s a music lover has had that experience where a record or a recording has kept you company when no one else is around. And I think that is what I’m hoping that people get out of my music.

There’s a very fine line between one person’s reality and another person’s fantasy.

I know a girl who cries when she practices violin because each note sounds so pure it just cuts into her, and then the melody comes pouring out her eyes. Now, to me, everything else just sounds like a lie.

Love’s an excuse to get hurt.

When I started writing songs, I was doing it for myself and a small circle of friends. And gradually, over the years, an audience became involved.

The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you’re going to find out you’re wrong – that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

I really believe in the way the energy can consolidate in certain geographical spots. You can find it in a lot of different places, beautiful natural spots, or if you look at Islam or Judaism or Christianity, these ideas of holy places.

The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it’s kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.

I would prefer to be a little nervous, because when you stop being nervous is kind of when you stop caring.

When I run into a person or a kid that comes up and gives me the spiel about, ‘Hey, I got your record at this time in my life, and it really helped me,’ that stuff totally still rings true. If you’re standing there talking to someone, it’s really easy to tell if they’re being authentic or not. And that’s great.

You can’t manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There’s still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don’t have a method that I can go back to – they either come or they don’t.

I like to feel the burn of the audience’s eyes when I’m whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone.

I have on many occasions spoken my mind from stage. I have offered organizations table space by the merch booth. I have donated a dollar-a-ticket, or the entire guarantee, to different causes. I have registered voters. I have played on behalf of political candidates.

In many ways Bright Eyes is really a studio project. We form bands to tour, but it really is – you know, we take the songs and we figure out how to decorate them and it’s all in the studio; we build the songs that way.

It’s dangerous to buy into praise and criticism for what you do when you’re trying to present your music to people. I don’t ignore it completely, but I don’t dwell on it too much.

The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you’re going to find out you’re wrong – that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

Sometimes I daydream about having a farm and a wife and some babies and watching the grass grow, but you have to meet the right person for that.

I have a terrible memory in general, but one thing I’ve always been able to remember is my songs.