Top 35 Michael Nesmith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Theater is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture.” I.”

— Michael Nesmith

2. “Behind every dark cloud there’s usually rain.”

— Michael Nesmith

3. “It’s important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.”

— Michael Nesmith

4. “There are more honest people and more good people than there are thieves and bad people. It’s just always been that way.”

— Michael Nesmith

5. “Just because you can thrill a toddler by chewing with your mouth open doesn’t mean you should.”

— Michael Nesmith

6. “First we’ll escape, then we’ll play baseball.”

— Michael Nesmith

7. “My nose is out being fixed.”

— Michael Nesmith

8. “You have to have access to ideas. The Internet is facilitating that access to ideas. In 25 years, the way that data’s going to flow back and forth, we don’t quite understand yet.”

— Michael Nesmith

9. “If you really dig a chick, you should talk to her, not steal her picture.”

— Michael Nesmith

10. “I coined a word the other day, but I forgot what it was. It was a good one, it came to me in a dream.”

— Michael Nesmith

11. “If you love music, you can play music.”

— Michael Nesmith

12. “I just finished a novel, and I’m back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I’m just not sure what kind of music it is or where it’s going.”

— Michael Nesmith

13. “As an artist, you don’t think about the parabola or the arc you’re describing or where you’re going to ultimately end up, you’re just kind of crawling around, seeing what’s out there.”

— Michael Nesmith

14. “James McMurtry is a true Americana poet – actually he is a poet regardless of genre.”

— Michael Nesmith

15. “Multimedia scares me off.”

— Michael Nesmith

16. “There is a certain logic to events that pushes you along a certain path. You go along the path that feels the most true, and most according to the principles that are guiding you, and that’s the way the decisions are made.”

— Michael Nesmith

17. “Interviews are usually a follow-up, like a press junket or a publicity junket, or something like that, and I’m not doing any of that right now. I don’t have any axes to grind.”

— Michael Nesmith

18. “Theres a certain logic to systems, and that logic is fairly self-evident. Its very straightforward, usually. It might take a little research, it might take a little bit of industry to prize it out, but its there to be seen.”

— Michael Nesmith

19. “You don’t have to fight against being placed in a box any more than the number two has to fight against being the number three. I mean, two is not going to be the number three, ever.”

— Michael Nesmith

20. “I never feel like I have to hang on to the music. I don’t expect that the music will go away. Ideas are the only thing I can point to that are permanent and fixed.”

— Michael Nesmith

21. “The rock sitting on the shelf has potential because it can fall-it’s the same way with the Internet. It has this potential. It’s not really doing it yet, but it’s about to.”

— Michael Nesmith

22. “People recognize intellectual property the same way they recognize real estate. People understand what property is. But it’s a new kind of property, and so the understanding uses new control surfaces. It uses a new way of defining the property.”

— Michael Nesmith

23. “I haven’t been out in the marketplace in a while. I’m thinking about going back into it. I’ve got some things set up over the next couple of months just to go and see. But I have no idea what the specific way to a solution is anymore. It’s mysterious to me.”

— Michael Nesmith

24. “Wealth, in terms of dollars and so forth, could be counted up, because dollars were finite. It doesn’t make any difference how many dollars you have-at a certain point you only have dollars. You start with finite, you end with finite.”

— Michael Nesmith

25. “Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It’s all just a use of your thinking.”

— Michael Nesmith

26. “It was becoming clear that I had not been hired to play music or to write it, which was OK with me, except at this moment of insight I didn’t know exactly what I had been hired to do.”

— Michael Nesmith

27. “It’s what the Iraqi people are going through right now. They have encountered a victorious, hostile force-but, you know, there they still are. There their culture is, there their history is, they’re not going anywhere.”

— Michael Nesmith

28. “The Internet provides the access to resources, so it’s incumbent upon the people who control those resources to make sure that the economic engine stays intact.”

— Michael Nesmith

29. “Even when I take the path to go be a CEO for a month, or a CEO for a day, music is still there. It’s an extremely important part of what I am.”

— Michael Nesmith

30. “Don’t object so much, you’ll live longer.”

— Michael Nesmith

31. “It’s clear that people are going to download media files, and they’re going to talk to each other, and they’re going to exchange information and knowledge and so forth. So this system logic is basically what you bounce off of.”

— Michael Nesmith

32. “I had no doubt that music was the most important thing in my life, and I was getting an education in that.”

— Michael Nesmith

33. “Typically what happens is, somebody drags an idea from the past that worked in an old set of logics that they try to apply to the new one. And it doesn’t work.”

— Michael Nesmith

34. “I’m not performing now. What I do now is listen to music all day long. Listening is very nourishing to me. I might go back to perform, I might make another record. I’ve got a record half finished.”

— Michael Nesmith

35. “Once the smoke of the market crash clears off, you know, the Internet will pick back up and go. Take a look at what’s happening to some of the big companies like eBay and Yahoo, the publicly traded stocks. You know, they’re all coming back up off the mat now.”

— Michael Nesmith

36. “Now, DVD can represent more income than the box office-and typically does.”

— Michael Nesmith

37. “There’s this notion that allows people to create their own collection of songs, so it rewrites what a song is. They may only want 10 seconds of something, or they may only want this particular song, or they want this group of songs. It becomes much more user-controlled.”

— Michael Nesmith

38. “Buzzwords and cliches – those are stock in trade. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

— Michael Nesmith

39. “I don’t quite know what a record is anymore. I don’t quite know how to describe it. Don’t know how to define it yet, so I’m just letting it gestate, and grow and see if maybe I’ll get a better sense of what a record is.”

— Michael Nesmith