Top 120 Carrie Brownstein Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that’s where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery.”

— Carrie Brownstein

2. “The internet is just a scary place. It’s better to just go to the doctor. Don’t let Google get inside your head. It will do bad things to you.”

— Carrie Brownstein

3. “To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness. Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degress of experience – to immerse without judgment. It’s like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There’s something that feels very timeless about fandom.”

— Carrie Brownstein

4. “I need a template of a template.”

— Carrie Brownstein

5. “These new bands sound like Gang of Four – if Gang of Four sucked.”

— Carrie Brownstein

6. “I love coffee. I love a midday espresso on set, just for the energy.”

— Carrie Brownstein

7. “They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you’re in the library of rock right now. When.”

— Carrie Brownstein

8. “I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There’s that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we’re doing sometimes, or why it matters. It’s our existential crisis.”

— Carrie Brownstein

9. “It’s important to redefine what it means to be ambitious. I think that ambition doesn’t have to be married to consumerism or materialism or capitalism. Ambition can embody compassion. It’s not just about the most for yourself. It’s about creating the most for everyone, and pushing forward so that other people can come along or take over.”

— Carrie Brownstein

10. “I always felt that the most common thread in my life from when I was young until now has been a highly observant, very analytical mind.”

— Carrie Brownstein

11. “It was writing about music for NPR – connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community – that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.”

— Carrie Brownstein

12. “Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It’s cliche to write that, but it’s true.”

— Carrie Brownstein

13. “I have no problem spending money on a great meal with friends or a flight to see somebody that I love, versus something like a fancy car. I don’t need a fancy car. I don’t need a giant TV.”

— Carrie Brownstein

14. “I think that there’s always an assumption, when a band goes on hiatus or stops playing, that there’s some acrimony brewing under the surface.”

— Carrie Brownstein

15. “Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited;.”

— Carrie Brownstein

16. “With Portlandia, I don’t think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We’re okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.”

— Carrie Brownstein

17. “Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling.”

— Carrie Brownstein

18. “There are foods you should avoid. For me, sugar is a no. Because it gives me a spike and then a crash.”

— Carrie Brownstein

19. “I don’t want to mislead people.”

— Carrie Brownstein

20. “People think that the digital age and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter nurture oversharing, but in 1992 there was nothing stopping me from treating any piece of paper like a personal diary.”

— Carrie Brownstein

21. “People are wearing fleece, which is a hard fabric to be angry in.”

— Carrie Brownstein

22. “I think short-term goals are important. Trying to set a missive for yourself for the entire year can be daunting, and it can feel too easy to fail or fall short of that.”

— Carrie Brownstein

23. “Nothing is as nice as plugging in your guitar and turning up the volume really loud, just seeing what kind of beautiful noise you can make with it.”

— Carrie Brownstein

24. “If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalised, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist.”

— Carrie Brownstein

25. “Practice. Learn and then unlearn – that’s the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can’t merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.”

— Carrie Brownstein

26. “I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it’s feeling. You’re not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.”

— Carrie Brownstein

27. “I don’t think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good.”

— Carrie Brownstein

28. “Just invest in apps. Just download apps and then pay yourself the dividend.”

— Carrie Brownstein

29. “I like to connect with people through my work. That’s my favorite way – meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out.”

— Carrie Brownstein

30. “I’ve learned to really enjoy video games. It’s really toxic to have in your house, because it’s really distracting.”

— Carrie Brownstein

31. “You can’t bury a part of yourself that’s so innate to who you’ve been, even if it’s not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.”

— Carrie Brownstein

32. “Sometimes I think that the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown.”

— Carrie Brownstein

33. “The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that’s where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence.”

— Carrie Brownstein

34. “I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.”

— Carrie Brownstein

35. “Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It’s the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.”

— Carrie Brownstein

36. “I’ve realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.”

— Carrie Brownstein

37. “For film and television, it’s interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It’s not just about being a fan, it’s about how you perform your fandom. That’s always been interesting to me.”

— Carrie Brownstein

38. “I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.”

— Carrie Brownstein

39. “I like how blogging emulates fandom because it’s so completist and spontaneous. It really mirrors the way people listen to music, and I like that fluidity with online content.”

— Carrie Brownstein

40. “I’m all about being prudent. And I’ve started to appreciate experiences more than actual objects.”

— Carrie Brownstein

41. “I’m kind of a hermit – it’s almost easier for me to write about connection than to actually connect.”

— Carrie Brownstein

42. “I think you should be prepared for a green-screen CGI at all times.”

— Carrie Brownstein

43. “Yet I felt it was unfair to be labeled when I had yet to find a label for myself, and when binary, fixed identities held no meaning or safety for me.”

— Carrie Brownstein

44. “With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.”

— Carrie Brownstein

45. “I really don’t know what to do when my life is not chaotic.”

— Carrie Brownstein

46. “You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.”

— Carrie Brownstein

47. “Anyone we truly love should come with their own dictionary.”

— Carrie Brownstein

48. “To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm.”

— Carrie Brownstein

49. “Eventually, I started to cringe at the elitism that was often paired with punk and the like. A movement that professed inclusiveness seemed to actually be highly exclusive, as alienating and ungraspable as many of the clubs and institutions that drove us to the fringes in the first place. One set of rules had simply been replaced by new ones, and they were just as difficult to follow.”

— Carrie Brownstein

50. “I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation – linguistic and aesthetic – in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.”

— Carrie Brownstein