Latest How to Dress Well Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Traveling is amazing. You meet so many great, positive people. You get to see new faces all the time. I don't think that loneliness, it's not like you have no one in your life. Well, I'd say it's like . . . you can have everyone you need in your life and still be lonely. Everyone knows that. Being on the road is complicated and shitty; it's also really, really rad.

  How to Dress Well

  Lonely, Loneliness, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• As someone who listens almost exclusively to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, I definitely like "No Bullshit" by Chris Brown, and melodically I'm really into what he's doing - that song is kind of singular because it's got this piano intro and outro. But obviously I'm not singing about what he's singing about. What we want out of our songs is not the same thing.

  How to Dress Well

  Song, Bullshit, Singing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I've come to realize that most of my intellectual postures and a lot of my intellectualism is super defensive and really symptomatic of basic fears. My one thing with the record is that I wanted to make something alien that wasn't alienating. And I think that the last thing I want is to dedicate my life to something which renders me further and further from being at home in my life - progressively more alienated and separate from myself.

  How to Dress Well

  Home, Thinking, Intellectual

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• "Everything must change, everything must stay the same." Those are good words to have circling around in my head. I just wish that I was able to deal with them, not by singing, but by helping myself. But singing helps, too.

  How to Dress Well

  Singing, Wish, Helping

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I do think that we're pretty future-obsessed right now, and I think that capitalism works best when we have a very short memory of the past, when we can just go forward seamlessly into a future of ever-new products and ever-new experiences - even though they're exactly the same, just on a watch instead of on a phone or whatever.

  How to Dress Well

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Every new generation of smartphone just has a different-shaped button. It's embarrassing.

  How to Dress Well

  Embarrassing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I have a German friend who works on memorialization. The last generation of Nazis and Holocaust survivors are now dying. So literally, we are threatened now for the first time ever, with memorializing that, with no first-person account of it left on earth. There's a lot of worry amongst scholars in Germany about what comes next: "All the memorialization has been done, we've done with everything we can."

  How to Dress Well

  Worry, Holocaust, Dying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• "Face Again" is actually the most George Saunders-y song. Basically the verses, I'm describing a world where love is being killed, and then in the first chorus, I'm sort of protesting it. It's like, "I don't think you know what's best for me." And then by the end, it's like I've given in, and it becomes very desperate.

  How to Dress Well

  Song, Love Is, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Our present era, to my mind, is characterized by a profound forgetting of the past. "The future, the future, the future." The 21st century, all the technology obsession.

  How to Dress Well

  Past, Technology, Profound

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I have this problem where I get incredibly, miserably nervous every single show. This is part of why touring is so exhausting for me. I have not gotten to a place where it's like, "All right, here's another." It just doesn't feel workaday, at all, yet. It's kind of killing me, being so nervous so many hours of the day. After the show - we try to end on an anthemic note, and I try and let that be decisive, and I will often come back out for an encore a cappella, and that's where I try and take leave from the feelings of the stage. Trying, after I do that, to return to my life.

  How to Dress Well

  Feelings, Trying, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Sometimes I'll go out to say hi to people, and I'm just not ready for it. It feels too weird, too intense.

  How to Dress Well

  People, Sometimes, Intense

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I feel like real thoughts and emotions involve the whole being. And they also outstrip little personal quirks, and they outstrip biography. You end up on a really special, universal, shared terrain in those experiences. I think it's available to absolutely every single thing made of flesh and blood.

  How to Dress Well

  Real, Thinking, Special

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Luckily, like for instance the song "Suicide Dream 1," I wrote it out of such an incredibly powerful state that the melody carries that affect. So when I produce that affect, that melody, with my body, I'm immediately thrown into it.

  How to Dress Well

  Suicide, Dream, Song

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I believe, and this is something I also learned from Alice Munro, that there's a moment where the personal becomes totally universal. When you see that person in their pathetic moment, that's the moment where the completely unifying sympathy with that person is possible - where you're no longer a person here and they're someone over there, and you can really feel like one, you can really feel like a human being. Or more like, you can really feel like flesh and blood, because I feel like that moment is the same thing with animals.

  How to Dress Well

  Believe, Animal, Moments

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Have you seen this video of these cows who have been in a dairy farm, a really shitty one, their entire lives, and they're let out into a field, and they're literally jumping with joy? It's crazy. I don't have any trouble completely becoming that cow. There's no "What is it really like to be a cow?" kind of question anymore. There's no question at that moment whether I understand you completely. I think there is, in that moment, a possible total sympathy. Total sharing.

  How to Dress Well

  Crazy, Thinking, Joy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• That's another thing in Alice Munro: it's always, like, some middle-aged woman who is going to cheat on her husband, and there's that moment where she decides to take an extreme risk. It's always after an extreme risk where life really happens for Alice Munro.

  How to Dress Well

  Husband, Risk, Moments

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I didn't sit down and write a song like, "I want to write a song about this," but I just spent so much time living in this affectively charged space of the live show, with its risks and the incredible reward that comes from people knowing me, recognizing me, affirming me. And then I would wake up in the morning and have an eight-hour drive where I would read George Saunders and listen to Grouper and Pure X. And you bond so much with your tour-mates and your bandmates because it's this weird, quite desperate way of living.

  How to Dress Well

  Song, Morning, Writing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• A lot of electronic-based musicians give very low-risk performances, and it's fun to hear your favorite band play live on a big speaker, but the live context is about the moment of risk and that moment of possible failure.

  How to Dress Well

  Fun, Giving, Risk

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think what's interesting about Alice Munro, too, is the extreme mundanity of things. And how even a life reduced to complete mundanity, like capitalism taking over rural Ontario or whatever, has complete sway over aspects of life. Nevertheless, people still have these moments of weird desperation, weird longing, weird true love, or weird, powerful lust, and that was a major inspiration for me, too.

  How to Dress Well

  Powerful, Inspiration, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Playing live is so weird because I go out there and I try so hard to give something, which will be recognized. And in turn, something will be given to me, there'll be some kind of shared moment in that. So it's very affectively intense - so much longing and lack of control.

  How to Dress Well

  Giving, Trying, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• What I'm confessing is that I've grown to a point where I feel like I should have more answers, and I don't. And I still think that applies in the George Saunders stuff.

  How to Dress Well

  Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• In Dardenne brothers' films is a really small kind of humanity. It's not like the titanic "humanity" of humanism, it's much more gritty and realistic. But again, humanity is what unites all the people I'm talking about, and in such different ways. The humanity is in that moment you glimpse someone and have a completely intimate moment with them, and that intimacy is connected to an extreme pathetic aspect.

  How to Dress Well

  People, Humanity, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think that a lot of dystopian literature tends to be really moralizing and just doesn't tend to give credence to the importance of the sentimental. Maybe it says, "We need love in this world," but it's always this tough, strong statement.

  How to Dress Well

  Strong, Thinking, Giving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• George Saunders is outside of Chicago too. I've met him a few times, actually. I really like him a lot. He's a really sweet guy. He's a big fan of my music now, too. I spent an enormous amount of time reading his work.

  How to Dress Well

  Sweet, Reading, Guy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Being on the road, because you do so much waiting and so much traveling. It's not the same thing as being in the same city for a week or two weeks and then another city. It's really hard. I don't think people understand this about being a touring musician, or a touring actor, or somebody who flies everywhere for business. It's incredibly disorienting.

  How to Dress Well

  Thinking, People, Waiting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com