Top 50 Elliott Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They say that God makes problems just to see what you can stand, before you do as the devil pleases.”

— Elliott Smith

2. “Everything means nothing to me.”

— Elliott Smith

3. “I didn’t have a hard time making it. I had a hard time letting it go.”

— Elliott Smith

4. “I truly hope the future will bring me something to feel nostalgic about, because there’s really nothing much so far I can remember fondly.”

— Elliott Smith

5. “I don’t really think of time off as writing blocks. I think that’s a western notion of demonizing inactivity. When your imagination decides it needs to take a nap. maybe that’s what it needs to do.”

— Elliott Smith

6. “I mean people just have a way of – y’know they’ll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don’t want to be in.”

— Elliott Smith

7. “Somewhere where people aren’t so mad would be nice, but I don’t know if there is anywhere like that.”

— Elliott Smith

8. “Burning every bridge that I cross to find some beautiful place to get lost.”

— Elliott Smith

9. “Fights problems with bigger problems.”

— Elliott Smith

10. “Nothing’s gonna drag me down to a death that’s not worth cheating.”

— Elliott Smith

11. “The devil’s script sells you the heart of a blackbird.”

— Elliott Smith

12. “People think they know all these things about other people, and if you ask them why they think they know that, it’d be hard for them to be convincing.”

— Elliott Smith

13. “Doing battle with themselves that way, every day, all the time and sometimes it sucks, but other times it results in people making sort of a dream comprehensible to someone else.”

— Elliott Smith

14. “If you play acoustic guitar you’re the depressed, sensitive guy.”

— Elliott Smith

15. “I’m the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous.”

— Elliott Smith

16. “All your secret wishes could right now be coming true.”

— Elliott Smith

17. “There’s always that argument to make – that you’re in better company historically if people don’t understand what you’re doing.”

— Elliott Smith

18. “But I was also doing odd jobs around Portland, like spreading gravel and transplanting bamboo trees.”

— Elliott Smith

19. “I watched myself put my paw in the bear trap on that one because there was this clause about leaving members.”

— Elliott Smith

20. “Certain songs just feel a way that’s hard to put into words and it’s not happy and it’s also not really sad but I couldn’t say what it is.”

— Elliott Smith

21. “I actually don’t think that I’m gonna sell a lot of records.”

— Elliott Smith

22. “I want to keep making records as long as I can and that’s the beginning and end of my concern about selling records.”

— Elliott Smith

23. “Playing things too safe is the most popular way to fail. Dying is another way...”

— Elliott Smith

24. “I went walking around the city some more, people watching with a cold, blank stare. And I saw your face in everyone, I swear.”

— Elliott Smith

25. “Static in my head, the reflected sound of everything, tried to go to where it led, but it didn’t lead to anything.”

— Elliott Smith

26. “I see you’re leaving me and taking up with the enemy, the cold comfort of the in-between, a little less than a human being.”

— Elliott Smith

27. “There’s lots of ways people can be dependent, on another person, or drugs...”

— Elliott Smith

28. “I’m happy some of the time, and some of the time I’m not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it’s usually happy and sad at the same time.”

— Elliott Smith

29. “You can take a picture of New York and one person looking at it will think it looks really depressing, frightening; and someone else will look at it and think of all the fun things you can do in New York. I think songs are kinda like that.”

— Elliott Smith

30. “Tired of dancing on a pot of gold flake paint.”

— Elliott Smith

31. “You can’t get better at things you never play.”

— Elliott Smith

32. “I walked out and Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away, so I avoided that area and I looked up at the balcony in the back and sang the song.”

— Elliott Smith

33. “A lot of people are kind of depressed. I’m happy some of the time, and some of the time I’m not.”

— Elliott Smith

34. “My girlfriend at the time convinced me to send these songs to Cavity Search. When they wanted to put out my record I was totally shocked.”

— Elliott Smith

35. “I don’t think it’s important who I am. I really like playing music, but I don’t really want to be anything in particular.”

— Elliott Smith

36. “Why would you want any other, when you’re a world within a world?”

— Elliott Smith

37. “I think the suggestion that all my songs are personal is insulting because that assumes that I have a bunch of issues that I feel the need to unload on strangers. That is not the case. It also assumes that I just talk about myself the whole time which, again, is not true.”

— Elliott Smith

38. “It’s just that a lot of songs that are popular right now, they don’t have any meaning.”

— Elliott Smith

39. “I just wanted to move out of Portland to do something.”

— Elliott Smith

40. “I don’t really like New York better than Portland. It’s just a different place.”

— Elliott Smith

41. “It was hard to sing like how I wanted to because playing live I had to just be at the top of my lungs all the time, and it made me sound like I had a really bad cold or something.”

— Elliott Smith

42. “Music is worth doing just because. It doesn’t have to be justified by some political point of view, and it’s kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else.”

— Elliott Smith

43. “It’s hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It’s much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation.”

— Elliott Smith

44. “I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that seems more important than something designed to raise money to keep something going that keeps IV drug users from dying.”

— Elliott Smith

45. “It’s a lot easier to tell the truth usually.”

— Elliott Smith

46. “There are lots of things I like about playing in a band, the things I cant do by myself you know.”

— Elliott Smith

47. “I didn’t think I was gonna be playing on the Oscars or anything.”

— Elliott Smith

48. “It was kind of ridiculous to carry it up to a certain point and then drop the ball or the bomb, like quitting the band right after we had signed to Virgin.”

— Elliott Smith

49. “So if somebody writes a song that appears to have some meaning then everybody thinks that it’s a really heavy song.”

— Elliott Smith

50. “I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record.”

— Elliott Smith