Top 111 Quotes & Sayings by Ezra Furman - Page 2

Just being a normal person and having a social life involves a lot of dishonesty for me.

I like going to bed early and getting up early, but that doesn't happen on tour.

I first got into music when I heard punk, and it was saying maybe it's OK if you don't live up to the expectations various authorities have for you.

You have to make a character of yourself if you're going to be known to strangers.

I think there's a large worry in queer communities about imitating straight people, when queerness has its own identity and maybe can be a radical force that should be dismantling stuff that locks people into structures.

I don't like the notion that artists have a responsibility to be political.

I think I'm becoming a climate activist.

I feel like my consignment and fear from people pushed me to become a performer.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

I heard the Velvet Underground and that changed things when I was like, 15.

Desperate times make for desperate songs.

If you get into really learning about the roots of monotheism, it was utterly a radical cultural moment. The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

I was pretty much into punk rock and that's all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.

In terms of keeping kosher, I've basically just been vegetarian. I want to be fully vegetarian anyway, though sometimes my mom makes chicken soup and I have to eat it. I just love it.

I think I'm gradually becoming a more politically aware person.

My main theme as a songwriter seems to be a feeling of homelessness, of being in motion. The feeling of being somehow unmoored, a radical internal freedom that is very painful and also joyful.

God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.

I'm a big fan of Louis CK - I think he's a master of standup.

Jews like to write and sing. In America, a lot of us have been eager to show that we're part of American culture. But it all goes back to King David writing Psalms.

I love obsessive fandom because I'm an obsessive fan who flips out over music.

A lot of bands break through with their third record: the White Stripes, the Clash, the Replacements.

I see a skill developing of writing about not just feelings that I'm feeling, but things that I deeply care about as well.

It's always about staying competitive with myself... Popularity is something that may happen from time to time, and I don't trust it and I don't think it means too much. I'm going for greatness.

I think of myself as someone who's trying to be a great songwriter and a great performer. And I mean really great.

I don't really worship the album 'Transformer.' It's not the best thing that Lou Reed has done.

Sometimes there's a day where I don't feel good being out in the world, and I feel unsafe in the world in general. And an anxiety about just showing up in the world. It's kind of irrational, but people do say things to me out in the street about how I'm dressed.

I get stage fright really bad sometimes, so touring has been hard on me in a lot of ways. But despite that, I love performing.

I feel like one thing that messed me up was living in a homophobic and transphobic society, and just being the object of mockery and disgust in your average sitcom or movie or person at school.

I take it hard whenever anything happens that makes, I guess, queer people feel less safe and less welcome in the world.

I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.

We take a lot of inspiration from punk rock and early rock 'n' roll from the '50s and early '60s.

I could write a joke song really easily, but I think something that might be true for my generation is that there's a certain irony or detachedness expected of us, even though we really feel sincere. So the only way to sincerity is through a joke.

I love it when people write rapturously about music they love.

I write good songs out of fear... fear of failure. Because if they're not good enough, you feel yourself starting to fall.

My focus is matters of the heart and matters of the spirit, emotion and passion and stuff like that. But I think I've been getting better at being more specific about what it is I care about. Such as the welfare of refugees and solidarity between threatened populations.

I was rather obsessed with angels.

Far from being a showbiz gimmick, for me dressing as I please has signalled the end of a lifelong performance of straightforward masculinity.

One of my goals in making music is to make the world seem bigger, and life seem larger.

I'm trying to be an activist, and I think of that as separate from my work as an artist. But it isn't.

I'm certainly not interested in religion for religion's sake or for some kind of structure or stabilizing force. Religion is supposed to be for God's sake and God is an unpredictable, wild thing.

I'm an amateur at music and an amateur at most things. I like the idea of offering some music and some records and a website to people who feel perplexed.

What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

I wanted to get a guitar [when I was 13] so I could play punk songs because kid taught me power chords at summer camp. He was like, "You could play all punk songs if you just learn this chord and just move it around on the guitar".

Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan I heard when I was 13. It was one of those things where it was like, "Hey, the world is much bigger than you imagined as a little kid."

I thought [ as a kid], "Maybe I don't want to start a punk band necessarily. I just want to learn to be a great songwriter," and got really into trying to figure out how that could be possible.

I think I gravitate towards rock 'n' roll as a playground where I can say anything.

The Bible was so revolutionary and against all that came before it. It was a force for siding with the oppressed and a rebellion against hierarchical, ancient societies. Now it's institutionalized and all the life has been sucked out of it.

I had so many secrets and so much social repression throughout my life. I guess I'm just a shy person and feel like my true self is unacceptable to most people.

I think [rock'n'roll] essence is what made it good and has a lot in common with what originally made monotheism good - it's against everything that is fixed, all the social structures that you can't go past.

I was like, "Who the hell is Bob Dylan?" I was going to learn one song to appease my mom and alphabetically the first song in the book was "Absolutely Sweet Marie." When I heard it, it was like "Oh, there is something going on here. It's not like my parents' boring music that I don't care about. This is totally electrifying."