Top 40 Sufjan Stevens Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.”

— Sufjan Stevens

2. “I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith.”

— Sufjan Stevens

3. “I like residing in abstraction.”

— Sufjan Stevens

4. “Love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it’s possible to love absent of mutual respect.”

— Sufjan Stevens

5. “I’m a very self-conscious person, I think we all are, but I’m especially not very comfortable in my body. I always feel really weird and awkward on the street or on the stage. It has nothing to do with circumstances, it’s just an ongoing psychological state, like white noise.”

— Sufjan Stevens

6. “All the time we spent in bed, counting miles before we said, fall in love and fall apart, things will end before they start.”

— Sufjan Stevens

7. “If there’s any kind of morality, for me, it’s about reality; what is reality? I have a hard time distinguishing what is valuable when it comes to the real world and the fantasy world. Like, should I invest my time in the ordinary world or the imaginary world?”

— Sufjan Stevens

8. “When I live, I’ll give it all I’ve got.”

— Sufjan Stevens

9. “The best fiction is geared toward conflict. We learn most about our characters through tension, when they are put up against insurmountable obstacles. This is true in real life.”

— Sufjan Stevens

10. “My music is just about story telling. I don’t have much to say, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I’m just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.”

— Sufjan Stevens

11. “We stayed a long, long time, to see you, to meet you, to see you at last.”

— Sufjan Stevens

12. “I’ve never known a man who loved me.”

— Sufjan Stevens

13. “We live in a world that is cruel to the earth itself. Man is a biological terrorist.”

— Sufjan Stevens

14. “I quickly learned that you don’t have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life.”

— Sufjan Stevens

15. “The Internet is just one big gossip chamber – that’s why it’s so fascinating and entertaining. It’s a fabulous platform for superficial communication.”

— Sufjan Stevens

16. “There’s a sense of urgency in understanding that your body is not really your own. We can control it to a certain extent through habits and good behavior, but there’s so much we don’t have control of.”

— Sufjan Stevens

17. “Life is all about toiling and labor. But obviously I get great joy in confronting challenge and taking risk.”

— Sufjan Stevens

18. “There is nothing more incredible and moving and appealing than good music, and it cannot always be reduced to a story, to exposition. It’s so much more abstract and brilliant.”

— Sufjan Stevens

19. “I’m terrified of just being myself because I think it’s boring. I know who I really am and I think it’s boring.”

— Sufjan Stevens

20. “My Dad used to say that the balance of the world relied on all of the monks who were living outside of society in creative isolation. I don’t quite understand the ascetic life or the private life or the monastic private life. But I definitely understand privacy’s value.”

— Sufjan Stevens

21. “That’s really where my heart is, unfortunately – I’m less interested in songwriting and more into just making noise.”

— Sufjan Stevens

22. “Tuesday night at the Bible study we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens.”

— Sufjan Stevens

23. “Public school felt like prison – cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.”

— Sufjan Stevens

24. “I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there.”

— Sufjan Stevens

25. “I’ve always been a visual person, I’m formerly a graphic designer. I’ve always seen myself as an observer. I like to maintain objectivity and don’t get too intimately involved in my subjects.”

— Sufjan Stevens

26. “Pro Tools is an incredible resource. I think it’s enabled me to do things that I wouldn’t have been able to do without this kind of computer editing.”

— Sufjan Stevens

27. “I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.”

— Sufjan Stevens

28. “The goal is to never stay the same. I always want to be changing and evolving. That’s the whole point of life and the whole point of making art is to be constantly moving.”

— Sufjan Stevens

29. “We live in community, and we’re created in community. We’re created out of the unity of two people, and then we’re made into a family. It’s just inherent in who we are.”

— Sufjan Stevens

30. “Fiction has always been a thorn in my side, because I’ve always wanted to be a writer but I can’t seem to really do it.”

— Sufjan Stevens

31. “One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.”

— Sufjan Stevens

32. “I was feeling privileged and self-conscious about my life as a musician, which feels self-absorbed. I can’t help it, I am a musician. This is what I do.”

— Sufjan Stevens

33. “An imaginary baby is so much easier than a real baby. No diapers to change.”

— Sufjan Stevens

34. “The Internet is manic. It’s very strange. I don’t think it’s healthy. They should outlaw posting comments! It’s a bummer to go somewhere to get information or buy tickets and you encounter profanity everywhere you go.”

— Sufjan Stevens

35. “I’ve always been obsessed with electronics and using computers and software. It’s always been part of my vernacular.”

— Sufjan Stevens

36. “It’s a mystical quality of music, that music isn’t really concrete, and it’s communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music’s like that. It’s not real. It’s unreal, it’s all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.”

— Sufjan Stevens

37. “The round-up is an aggressive tradition. I’m trying to objectively be a steward of the tradition and what it means in its choreography.”

— Sufjan Stevens

38. “Growing up on the border there, we were always frustrated with people’s pronunciations of towns in Michigan, and people mispronouncing Illinois. There are all these Native American words that no one really knows how to pronounce.”

— Sufjan Stevens

39. “I don’t really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It’s just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.”

— Sufjan Stevens

40. “A musician’s attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the ‘Modifier’s Madness.’ A lot of adjectives working overtime.”

— Sufjan Stevens

41. “The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it’s an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it’s the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.”

— Sufjan Stevens

42. “I think musicians should stay off television generally.”

— Sufjan Stevens

43. “I’m always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I’ve always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I’m much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.”

— Sufjan Stevens

44. “It’s traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don’t experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It’s all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.”

— Sufjan Stevens

45. “I’ve been working a lot on figuring out how to sing differently and better. I want to become a better singer. I want to sing out more. I want to me more extroverted, vocally.”

— Sufjan Stevens

46. “I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don’t think my music would speak to those people. I don’t even want those people to hear what I’m doing.”

— Sufjan Stevens

47. “There’s such a magnitude of record taking. It’s so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.”

— Sufjan Stevens