Regina Spektor Quotes

I am very close with my parents, they are very amazing, so loving, so cool, and really valued art.

I care so much about making things that are useful for people to have and listen to, but I don't care so much that I won't do whatever the hell I want. It's just one of those things.

I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.

Pick a star on the dark horizon and follow the light.

We’re trying to be faithful but we’re cheating, cheating, cheating

There's something about trying to know when you really need to protect yourself, or else you're not going to get anything done, and sometimes to be really uncomfortable or agitated or annoyed or bored. Boredom is so important.

You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant.

I'd always wanted to work in the studio and experiment with sounds. Things that I'm really influenced by and that I love are like The Beatles and Radiohead, and all those records by bands whose music is really involved.

This is the way I want to die. Torn apart by angry fans who want me to play a different song.

As you get older as an animal on the planet, you want to get a little more comfortable, you want to get cozier.

When I think of my art tribe - you know, my peeps - there are certain people who are autobiographers that I really love. But for the most part, overwhelmingly, my tribes are the surrealists and the storytellers, in song and literature.

I think that I'm always going to think that it's silly to value certain things that no matter how many people find it really valuable, it's always just going to seem a little silly to me.

I knew all this Beatles music. I knew the songs phonetically. It was like my whole experience of that music was out of focus, and somebody put the perfect glasses on me, and all of a sudden I could see everything.

When I walk through the city, I just think that I see my family. I see us in everybody, you know? I see us.

No one's laughing at God -We're all laughing with God.

So break me to small parts, let go in small doses, but spare some for spare parts.

Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible.

Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions.

Never, never mind your bleeding heart.

God, our world is so complicated.

Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space experience.

There's an artist that I listened to for the first time, and I really didn't like them. I had some kind of adverse reaction, and later, it became my favorite thing.

All the monsters in your mind just want to be nice. They want to be kind. They want to play nice. They want to be softer than the storms around. You feel them through the windows and the doors.

I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.

The piano is not firewood -- yet.

I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka.

It's a privilege to work with an artist that you really care for.

This is how it works You're young until you're not You love until you don't You try until you can't You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath No, this is how it works You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And try to love the things you took And then you take that love you made And stick it into some Someone else's heart Pumping someone else's blood And walking arm in arm You hope it don't get harmed But even if it does You'll just do it all again

You can take art, you can have a baby, you can have a career.

And the history books forgot about us, and the bible didn’t mention us

I think that so many people don't understand how easy it is to be broke, how easy it is to find yourself in a situation where you're in an absolutely foreign place.

And people are just people, They shouldn't make you nervous. The world is everlasting, It's coming and it's going.

I have the coolest parents.

Maybe you should kiss someone who is nice, or lick a rock, or both.

We're living in a den of thieves

Songs kind of live in a timeless place for me, and since I make records I dunno, about every two-and-a-half to three years or something like that, it's just not enough to put all the songs that I have, no matter how much I put.

I spent the '80s in the Soviet Union and when I came to America it was '89 and I was in an immigrant bubble and we didn't have MTV or cable, so I kind of discovered the '80s when I was already older, maybe in college. And I continued to have this romantic obsession with all those films and there's this sound I hear in my head and it's kind of this bittersweet romantic, dark sound.

I feel like there's just so much of everything that I don't know what people have heard and what they haven't heard. I think with the fact that there's the Internet and that people can share home-made recordings, I think a lot of the songs do get to be heard, even if it's not the best quality, or there's clinking glasses or it's just piano and voice, people can at least hear the song.

I have this obsession with the '80s because I missed all of it.

I think to me, all songs are stories.

I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.

I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone's (he's French but it's an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory.

I just think music is one of those frontiers where people really want the "I" to be you.

I'm really terrible at math, so I won't even attempt to do ratios and percentages, but all I know is that there's a lot of new songs that no-one has heard yet, and that there's a lot of old songs that some very, very super hardcore fans have heard for sure - there are people that have been coming and seeing me play in bars in like 2002, and there are songs that those people heard.

You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.

You're using your headphones to drown out your mind

If somebody wanted to go and find songs of mine to fill an iPod, that aren't on any records. They could probably find dozens of songs besides the ones that are on records.

I'm much more into someone who is telling stories than somebody who is writing a record about their breakup. It's just more interesting for me.