Elliott Smith Quotes

People think they know all these things about other people, and if you ask them why they think they know that, it'd be hard for them to be convincing.

I actually don't think that I'm gonna sell a lot of records.

I'm just writing songs about how I feel or about how people I know feel.

It was hard to sing like how I wanted to because playing live I had to just be at the top of my lungs all the time, and it made me sound like I had a really bad cold or something.

I walked out and Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away, so I avoided that area and I looked up at the balcony in the back and sang the song.

I think the suggestion that all my songs are personal is insulting because that assumes that I have a bunch of issues that I feel the need to unload on strangers. That is not the case. It also assumes that I just talk about myself the whole time which, again, is not true.

I didn't have a hard time making it. I had a hard time letting it go.

It's hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It's much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation.

I don't really like New York better than Portland. It's just a different place.

They say that God makes problems just to see what you can stand, before you do as the devil pleases.

A lot of people are kind of depressed. I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not.

I was trying to do the same thing that I always do which is make an interesting record

Haven't laughed this hard in a long time. I better stop now before I start crying. Go off to sleep in the sunshine...I don't want to see the day when its dying.

I mean people just have a way of - y'know they'll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don't want to be in

The devil's script sells you the heart of a blackbird.

People can be chaos but it's hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made. It's hard.

I've been doing four-track songs by myself since I was like a teenager, where I'd sing in a way that I ... I just didn't think other people would like it, so I didn't play it for them but eventually I got over that, which I'm happy that I did, because it's kind of a drag to be playing a kind of music that you don't really like as much as another kind.

I watched myself put my paw in the bear trap on that one because there was this clause about leaving members

I wondered if I would talk about drug use. But I guess, why hide it?