Top 50 Michael Stipe Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everybody hurts sometimes Everybody cries.”

— Michael Stipe

2. “Sometimes I’m confused by what I think is really obvious. But what I think is really obvious obviously isn’t obvious...”

— Michael Stipe

3. “Anybody that walks can sing...”

— Michael Stipe

4. “So, when you divide the world into music lovers, music fans and then those people who are just very casual about their music, it’s wallpaper to them, it’s elevator music, it’s just the thing that’s playing in the background that helps them through their day.”

— Michael Stipe

5. “I’ve always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.”

— Michael Stipe

6. “Love, love will be my strongest weapon.”

— Michael Stipe

7. “When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes. Keep your money in your shoes.”

— Michael Stipe

8. “The only thing to fear is fearlessness.”

— Michael Stipe

9. “The punk-rock ethos was “Do it yourself. Anyone can do this. We’re not sent from the heavens.””

— Michael Stipe

10. “Super casual music listeners. That’s most of the people in the world. And you have to understand, that’s why Top 40 radio exists. It’s not there for people who seek out music and who love music.”

— Michael Stipe

11. “I was vulnerable every day. Every night that I stepped on stage I was laying myself open.”

— Michael Stipe

12. “I’m not homosexual, I’m not hetrosexual, I’m just sexual.”

— Michael Stipe

13. “If you disagree with me, fine! Because that’s the great thing about America, we can disagree!”

— Michael Stipe

14. “By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn’t getting from the ’70s mainstream.”

— Michael Stipe

15. “Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.”

— Michael Stipe

16. “We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.”

— Michael Stipe

17. “So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we’re kind of an international phenomenon.”

— Michael Stipe

18. “I’m afraid of everything. I’m not a naturally courageous person.”

— Michael Stipe

19. “Frankly I’m not great with heroin addicts. I tried heroin, but it was by accident. I’m not great with that level of substance abuse.”

— Michael Stipe

20. “I’m tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.”

— Michael Stipe

21. “When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else.”

— Michael Stipe

22. “Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.”

— Michael Stipe

23. “Here’s a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s.”

— Michael Stipe

24. “It was ’86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.”

— Michael Stipe

25. “But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we’re very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.”

— Michael Stipe

26. “We made part of the record in Miami, and I would go down to the beach, and not 20 feet from the water I see a fish that is at least seven feet long swimming close to the shore. I did not go back in the ocean the entire month.”

— Michael Stipe

27. “I started lip-synching with “Losing My Religion.” There were a few horrendous mistakes we made, but I own those mistakes. I’m embarrassed by them. I always say when I look back at anything I’ve ever done, it’s with equal dollops of humiliation and triumphant glory.”

— Michael Stipe

28. “When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I’ve tried pure joy in music, it doesn’t really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that’s what I do well, and observation.”

— Michael Stipe

29. “I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.”

— Michael Stipe

30. “I am not an autobiographical writer. I’ll take little elements here and there from things that I’ve actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example.”

— Michael Stipe

31. “Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It’s equally humbling and uplifting.”

— Michael Stipe

32. “Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don’t really care what’s playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it’s easy to drive to or it’s easy to sing along to or whatever.”

— Michael Stipe

33. “My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.”

— Michael Stipe

34. “Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters.”

— Michael Stipe

35. “I’m just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I’ve written about.”

— Michael Stipe

36. “I was born in Georgia. That’s where my grandparents-and all my people-are from. But my family traveled a great deal because my dad was in the army as a helicopter pilot.”

— Michael Stipe

37. “I really wanted to be on Six Feet Under as a corpse. That would be hysterical.”

— Michael Stipe

38. “The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I’ve always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, ‘OK, that’s me.’”

— Michael Stipe

39. “There is always something of the writer in the work but I don’t think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I’ve written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.”

— Michael Stipe

40. “We’re kind of an international phenomenon.”

— Michael Stipe

41. “Links have become the suburbs of the real world.”

— Michael Stipe

42. “If I’m tired of me, I’m sure the public is as well.”

— Michael Stipe

43. “The whole point of the punk-rock thing was that “We’re not special. We just have a voice.””

— Michael Stipe

44. “Man, you guys sound great. If I wasn’t in the band, I’d be a big fan. I’d go see us live. I would be irritated by me every now and then, but I would like us a lot.”

— Michael Stipe

45. “When I get really hammered I take my clothes off. That’s a sure sign. It’s been a long time since the last time I did that. Probably a year.”

— Michael Stipe

46. “There are people that very strongly identify themselves as gay and then lesbian, and then I think there are a lot of people who are kind of some percentage or some version of that.”

— Michael Stipe

47. “On planes I always cry. Something about altitude, the lack of oxygen and the bad movies. I cried over a St. Bernard movie once on a plane. That was really embarrassing.”

— Michael Stipe

48. “And I don’t expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did – and really didn’t – in the 1960s.”

— Michael Stipe

49. “When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.”

— Michael Stipe

50. “They always want me to play myself and that’s a big snooze.”

— Michael Stipe