Top 100 Rob Sheffield Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “But bringing people together is what music has always done best.”

— Rob Sheffield

2. “It’s kind of amazing how popular ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?”

— Rob Sheffield

3. “When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.”

— Rob Sheffield

4. “Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.”

— Rob Sheffield

5. “But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.”

— Rob Sheffield

6. “Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.”

— Rob Sheffield

7. “The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with – nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.”

— Rob Sheffield

8. “Ron Swanson is more than the MVP of the ‘Parks and Recreation’ squad, more than just the funniest character on TV – he’s the perfect depiction of aggrieved American manhood at the twilight of the empire.”

— Rob Sheffield

9. “In the old days, when a star left a still-thriving hit show, they’d celebrate by killing him or her off. But ‘The Office’ dispatched Michael Scott in a crueler and more final way: they made him normal. Since we’re talking about Michael Scott, ‘normal’ might be stretching it, obviously.”

— Rob Sheffield

10. “You know the Prince song where the girl’s phone rings but she tells him, “whoever’s calling couldn’t be as cute as you?” I long to live out this moment in real life.”

— Rob Sheffield

11. “What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.”

— Rob Sheffield

12. “This is what they call “hitting rock bottom,” and they call it that because it rocks.”

— Rob Sheffield

13. “Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I’m a mix-tape, a cassette that’s been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.”

— Rob Sheffield

14. “That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private.” That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don’t have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you give up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you’re just screwed. So I felt safer not even thinking about it.”

— Rob Sheffield

15. “I’d shut the whole world down just to tell you.”

— Rob Sheffield

16. “Love dies in many different ways, and it’s natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it’s not a competition; there’s plenty of pain to go around.”

— Rob Sheffield

17. “I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.”

— Rob Sheffield

18. “The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.”

— Rob Sheffield

19. “Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.”

— Rob Sheffield

20. “Our amour fou with ‘The Sopranos’ is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We’ll never see a show like this again.”

— Rob Sheffield

21. “In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.”

— Rob Sheffield

Featured in: Romance Quotes

22. “Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.”

— Rob Sheffield

23. “But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.”

— Rob Sheffield

24. “I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.”

— Rob Sheffield

25. “I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.”

— Rob Sheffield

26. “I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.”

— Rob Sheffield

27. “The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart.”

— Rob Sheffield

28. “Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.”

— Rob Sheffield

29. “Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.”

— Rob Sheffield

30. “I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an alter boy back home, so I served two masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles – it was like being a glamrock roadie for God.”

— Rob Sheffield

31. “Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.”

— Rob Sheffield

32. “The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.”

— Rob Sheffield

33. “Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-a-long.”

— Rob Sheffield

34. “Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from the Facts of Life, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.”

— Rob Sheffield

35. “Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.”

— Rob Sheffield

36. “When Ke$ha tries to rap like L’Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she’s the star. Ke$ha’s greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!”

— Rob Sheffield

37. “There’s only the one, see. When you fall in love with a girl, she’s the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don’t understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she’s the bloody Beatles White Album and there’s only one of her.”

— Rob Sheffield

38. “One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people’s religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.”

— Rob Sheffield

39. “It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.”

— Rob Sheffield

40. “If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy. If the girls don’t dance, nobody’s happy.”

— Rob Sheffield

41. “Anyone watching ‘30 Rock’ always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She’s the boss; Liz Lemon just works here.”

— Rob Sheffield

42. “It’s always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.”

— Rob Sheffield

43. “Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.”

— Rob Sheffield

44. “Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid.”

— Rob Sheffield

45. “Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in ‘Veep.’ She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play ‘Veep’ would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn’t one.”

— Rob Sheffield

46. “It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I’d ever known.”

— Rob Sheffield

47. “A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.”

— Rob Sheffield

48. “But if you listen to outtakes from the sessions, you can hear the Beatles worked out harmonies for “Eight Days a Week” – beautiful harmonies, in fact. Yet they cut the harmonies and sang in unison, to make the song sound like it took less work than it did. They spent seven hours in the studio tinkering with “Eight Days a Week,” adding and subtracting, until they got that unrehearsed feel. So much guile went into making the song sound like a moment’s exhalation.”

— Rob Sheffield

49. “Every American wants a clean slate, but nobody wants to lose what they’ve got.”

— Rob Sheffield

50. “I’ve built my whole life around loving music. I’m a writer for ‘Rolling Stone,’ so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds.”

— Rob Sheffield