Sufjan Stevens famous quotes

07-19-2025

A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Musician #Adjectives #Madness
Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Wall #School #Light
I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Dog #Thinking #Sick
All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Falling In Love #Falling Apart #Bed
When I live, I'll give it all I've got.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Giving
One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Memories #Father #White
I think musicians should stay off television generally.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Thinking #Television #Musician
Tuesday night at the Bible study we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Night #Hands #Tuesday
Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Writing #Blood #Years
The World's Fair was the precursor to theme parks like Disneyworld, and the really sort of cheap, superficial promotional architecture that you see everywhere in the U.S. I think there's a danger when you start creating a civilisation that isn't meant to last.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Thinking #Creating #Lasts
I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Real #Broken #Car
We stayed a long, long time, to see you, to meet you, to see you at last.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Long #Lasts #Invisible
I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song,
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Song #Have Faith #Albums
We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Two #People #Community
Iâ€™ve never known a man who loved me.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Men
I'm a very self-conscious person, I think we all are, but I'm especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances, it's just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Thinking #Self #White
I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Book #Knitting #Littles
I like residing in abstraction.
-- Sufjan Stevens
I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I canâ€™t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because thereâ€™s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion. You can kiss all over the body. You can kiss yourself to sleep. And when you wake up, you canâ€™t stop thinking about kissing. Dammit, I canâ€™t get anything done because Iâ€™m so busy thinking about kissing. Kissing is madness! But itâ€™s absolute paradise, if you can find a good kisser.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Sex #Sleep #Kissing
I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Beautiful #Philosophical #Reality
My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Mind #Singing #Trying
Art is â€¦ a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Art #Reflection #Separation
I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.
-- Sufjan Stevens

#Song #Writing #Thinking

You may also like:

Aesop Rock
Hip-hop artist
Andrew Bird
Musician
Big Daddy Kane
Rapper
Brother Ali
Hip-hop artist
Bryce Dessner
Composer
Buck 65
Hip-hop artist
Cat Stevens
Singer-songwriter
Courtney Barnett
Singer-songwriter
Devendra Banhart
Singer-songwriter
Elliott Smith
Singer-songwriter
Grand Puba
Iron & Wine
Singer-songwriter
J Tillman
Singer-songwriter
Joanna Newsom
Pianist
Regina Spektor
Singer-songwriter
St. Vincent
Singer-songwriter
Will Oldham
Singer-songwriter
DJ Premier
Nico Muhly
Musical composer
Son Lux
Musician