Top 70 Stephen Malkmus Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Family is the best. I can honestly say, it’s a gift that is beyond making art. I didn’t know that when I got into it.”

— Stephen Malkmus

2. “If there can be some paradigm shift thing that you can be part of, that’s cool.”

— Stephen Malkmus

3. “There’s always a chance, a goal to make something different and get it right, finally.”

— Stephen Malkmus

4. “A good voice isn’t so important. It’s more important to sound really unique.”

— Stephen Malkmus

5. “I’m better when I’m an autodidact and things just come. Or you’re just blessed. I’m not bragging or anything, it just comes to you.”

— Stephen Malkmus

6. “I really do think everybody can sing.”

— Stephen Malkmus

7. “I like visual imagery in my head.”

— Stephen Malkmus

8. “I’m not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.”

— Stephen Malkmus

9. “I’m more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.”

— Stephen Malkmus

10. “If you have no shame, and it’s your goal to get people into bed, how much higher could your success rate possibly be?”

— Stephen Malkmus

11. “Most people want to be seen or heard. You want to shine. That’s my way of shining.”

— Stephen Malkmus

12. “We’re probably a couple of freaks who’ve created their own little universe, are living in our own little world and that’s the only place where we can survive.”

— Stephen Malkmus

13. “George Oppen wasn’t a larger than life personality, but I’m not either. And he lived a long time, so he was happy. Going down in flames is fine, too.”

— Stephen Malkmus

14. “I thought The Doors were the greatest band for a while.”

— Stephen Malkmus

15. “I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don’t come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can’t do a riff album. I’m more of a song, melody person.”

— Stephen Malkmus

16. “It’s just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don’t know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.”

— Stephen Malkmus

17. “So much of rock lyrics is just a mirror of real feeling. It doesn’t feel dangerous to me. They just feel like “rock lyrics.””

— Stephen Malkmus

18. “Don’t go to the same studio twice, or work with the same engineer twice.”

— Stephen Malkmus

19. “The lyrics are different from Nick Cave songs and lyrics. His songs are very narrative.”

— Stephen Malkmus

20. “I like a narrative, even if it’s fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them – sometimes phonetics. I’m just stringing those together.”

— Stephen Malkmus

21. “The best I do, if I’m just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I’ll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.”

— Stephen Malkmus

22. “There’s no reason to stop. Who knows what’s around the bend? To participate, meet new people. It’s mostly other musicians and people like you, or anybody I meet who’s in this, that keeps me going.”

— Stephen Malkmus

23. “Men are men and women are women, but the men are dumber than the women, usually.”

— Stephen Malkmus

24. “My wife says that I changed people’s lives or ways of thinking and that I should always be proud and grateful. If I’m dismissive of what we do sometimes, a little bit, she’s like, “I was a fan, you changed my life,” or whatever. That’s what she says.”

— Stephen Malkmus

25. “I don’t really know where the songs are coming from often. Many of the best things I made up were just off the top of my head.”

— Stephen Malkmus

26. “You don’t realize that when you’re young, and you’re surprised there’s a lot of people at your gig – you just think it’s general British-press hype.”

— Stephen Malkmus

27. “I don’t know if you look back on your life and just see successes, but probably the first things that pop up are the regrets.”

— Stephen Malkmus

28. “Lou Reed is something like a personal favorite of mine, but you could always put me into that drawer of singers who can’t really sing, who speak their songs.”

— Stephen Malkmus

29. “I didn’t really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny.”

— Stephen Malkmus

30. “Like the song “Stereo”, to me that’s like, kind of hip-hop in that slacker way. There’s some slackerisms mixed in with that stuff, but it wasn’t really conscious, I guess. When things would get more typical rock’n’roll that was my fallback to go to those kind of lyrics instead of the alternatives.”

— Stephen Malkmus

31. “I’m not dying for everyone to hear everything we do. Forty minutes every two years is sensible.”

— Stephen Malkmus

32. “When a band means a lot to you, you build the fantasy more than the reality. Always.”

— Stephen Malkmus

33. “Well, you know, it’s a younger person, and it was maybe an effort to be a little more sincere and adult about the lyrics occasionally, which is a good thing. It’s nice that it’s not too self-conscious like some of our lyrics could be.”

— Stephen Malkmus

34. “When I was in high school, I was a late bloomer. And just like all those supermodels who said they were gawky and no one liked them, that was me – metaphorically. And so I was ready to rise like a phoenix in later times.”

— Stephen Malkmus

35. “I did some writing. I was just taking the kids to school. I did a couple things and we did some tours. It was a lot of downtime.”

— Stephen Malkmus

36. “We’re not on a desperate mission to write chart compatible stuff.”

— Stephen Malkmus

37. “But we’re still rehearsing and planning to make a new album next year. We have some really good new songs that we’ve already been playing on that last tour that we just finished.”

— Stephen Malkmus

38. “I like that band Get Hustle. They’re cool live. I haven’t heard their records, though.”

— Stephen Malkmus

39. “Basically, no one else gives me any opinions on lyrics. I don’t ask for them. If they did, I would listen.”

— Stephen Malkmus

40. “Despite my own doubts of being marketable or crushworthy, my goal was to write a record of peppy pop songs, hopefully without annoying anybody.”

— Stephen Malkmus

41. “I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.”

— Stephen Malkmus

42. “Maybe I don’t have the patience to make a virtue of necessity – the patience to carry something all the way through, and to actually say something. Lately, the songs are more jagged and they don’t really lend themselves to that. I just take it one bit at a time.”

— Stephen Malkmus

43. “We always did our own mixing.”

— Stephen Malkmus

44. “If you’d rather learn how to ride a horse or something, I would say do that. That’ll keep you out of trouble. You would think a band would get you in trouble, but I think it’s the opposite.”

— Stephen Malkmus

45. “That’s why you go to a nice studio. You can get a magic take. You don’t really have to do anything to it.”

— Stephen Malkmus

46. “I just don’t think people listen. I mean, they can’t listen to a whole album closely without checking their iPhone or wanting to skip to their favorite song, or putting something else on, practically. That’s why the zone out is a good thing.”

— Stephen Malkmus

47. “It’s normally in the morning, just playing around. And I’m not saying everything I make is great, but that’s what I do. I can’t even remember how I wrote stuff.”

— Stephen Malkmus

48. “I think the focus of the media changes. At the moment the more electronic stuff like trip-hop was the flavor of the month, just a little while ago. It all depends on the angle, from which point of view you see it.”

— Stephen Malkmus

49. “But, then again, I wouldn’t call myself an indie-rock supporter even if there are some really good bands out there and there will always be some real good new bands.”

— Stephen Malkmus

50. “If someone’s really busy listening to other CDs, and worried about what’s new and what’s truly relevant for discourse now, maybe it isn’t that interesting. To me it is, because I’m tuned into that and that’s what I like, so it’s interesting to me. It’s all I can do.”

— Stephen Malkmus