Top 60 Kim Gordon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you don’t fit into a certain type, there’s a lot of strength in just being who you are.”

— Kim Gordon

2. “It’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.”

— Kim Gordon

3. “You can’t be a strong or cool woman and be represented except in a harsh way, looking mean and cold and hard. It’s like reverse sexism.”

— Kim Gordon

4. “In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns ‘making the personal public’ into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.”

— Kim Gordon

5. “Eu nunca quis ser qualquer coisa, exceto quem eu era.”

— Kim Gordon

6. “In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.”

— Kim Gordon

7. “People pay to see others believe in themselves.”

— Kim Gordon

8. “There’s only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.”

— Kim Gordon

9. “For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either.”

— Kim Gordon

10. “Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.”

— Kim Gordon

11. “The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.”

— Kim Gordon

12. “Many designers are gay men making clothes for women. Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.”

— Kim Gordon

13. “I see it as more of a teenage activity than, you know, she’s only 11, but you know, I think it’s great that she knows so many girls who want to play music. And I see it more as a teen activity than I do as going into music.”

— Kim Gordon

14. “The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting – to see what people do with it. That’s more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.”

— Kim Gordon

15. “You’re always going to feel like you’re catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.”

— Kim Gordon

16. “I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.”

— Kim Gordon

17. “Still, I’ve always believed – still do – that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.”

— Kim Gordon

18. “Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.”

— Kim Gordon

19. “I tend to want to listen to melancholy music, but sometimes if you’re feeling too sad, you can’t.”

— Kim Gordon

20. “The only really good performance is the one where you make yourself vulnerable, while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone.”

— Kim Gordon

21. “I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men-white male corporate society. So why wouldnt a woman want to rebel against that?”

— Kim Gordon

22. “I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn’t meant to be done for 25 years.”

— Kim Gordon

23. “I like being in a weak position, and making it strong.”

— Kim Gordon

24. “No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour – sociopathy, narcissism – because it’s good rock and roll, good entertainment! I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.”

— Kim Gordon

25. “Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I “empowered”? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a “strong woman”? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don’t fall to your death.”

— Kim Gordon

26. “Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries .”

— Kim Gordon

27. “Hold me tight, down on my knees, so I don’t go burning ’cross the breeze.”

— Kim Gordon

28. “I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians – that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.”

— Kim Gordon

29. “It’s really hard for me to sing and play bass.”

— Kim Gordon

30. “Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are.”

— Kim Gordon

31. “I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone’s noticing me.”

— Kim Gordon

32. “Unless you’re singing something that’s kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it’s just difficult.”

— Kim Gordon

33. “I’m not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.”

— Kim Gordon

34. “I think of myself as unconventional. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what’s expected – despite wanting to get some recognition through performing – but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.”

— Kim Gordon

35. “I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things – a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace.”

— Kim Gordon

36. “That stage in life when older people assume that just because you’ve graduated college you know who you are, or what you’re doing, and in fact most people don’t.”

— Kim Gordon

37. “No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls – they’re masquerading as little girls. It’s repulsive.”

— Kim Gordon

38. “I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.”

— Kim Gordon

39. “There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.”

— Kim Gordon

40. “I’m aware of how pop culture really infiltrates your expectations in a way that even if you think you’re savvy about pop culture, it’s so hard not to have these expectations of what a relationship should be. So I constantly feel like I have to bat those expectations down.”

— Kim Gordon

41. “It wasn’t some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not to be blind consumers, and not to be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation.”

— Kim Gordon

42. “I always wanted to rebel.”

— Kim Gordon

43. “If you’re at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.”

— Kim Gordon

44. “Everything people call fabulous or amazing lasts for about ten minutes before the culture moves on to the next thing.”

— Kim Gordon

45. “Everyone’s so interior now, they’re not really looking around them. They’re on their phones.”

— Kim Gordon

46. “Anyone becomes mannered if you think too much about what other people think.”

— Kim Gordon

47. “You know, we have our own audience, and it’s not like – they just know we’re not going to do certain things.”

— Kim Gordon

48. “All that young-girl idealism is someone else’s now.”

— Kim Gordon

49. “There’s the added element of adrenaline if you’re performing. You’re aware of spatial relationships and the music.”

— Kim Gordon

50. “And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.”

— Kim Gordon