Top 204 Quotes & Sayings by Trent Reznor
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Trent Reznor.
Last updated on April 21, 2025.
I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.
I would love to be looked at some day - and I'm not ever saying I'm at this level - but I'd love to be mentioned in the same breath as a Bowie or an Eno. Those are the people that I admire artistically, their career trajectory, the integrity throughout their career, the bravery of their career.
I was up above it. Now, I'm down in it.
I was excited by the process of Pandora, which I still think is a decent product. Not as great in actuality as it sounds. After the first hour, its weaknesses start to show up.
Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.
The dynamic of a relationship changes when one person gets sober.
Self-examination with a close-up mirror in an antiseptic environment is what Nine Inch Nails is based on.
I think there's something strangely musical about noise.
You're standing onstage in a sold-out arena with people singing your music, and you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Because here's a party that, essentially, it's for you. And you still somehow feel like you don't belong there. Those people all have their lives and go back home.
What I have appreciated about the 'Call of Duty' games is the scale of production. It's not an indie game. It's not trying to be an indie game. But I've genuinely been pretty consistently blown away by, wow, what an effort has gone into this.
Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.
I do actually believe in love. I can't say that I'm 100 percent successful in that department, but I think it's one of the few worthwhile human experiences. It's cooler than anything I can think of right now.
I write most of my songs when I'm in a bad mood.
As long as it feels valid to me and feels sincere, I'll do what I do under the moniker of Nine Inch Nails if it's appropriate. I would hate to think I would ever be in a position where I'm faking it to get a paycheck.
I did not grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio.
Sometimes we pee on each other before we go on stage.
I think it's just an awkward time right now to be a musician.
I have been wildly enthused about gaming since I was younger, and a career path I chose not to go down but did really consider was getting into programming and game design.
Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.
In my life, I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far, and who says you have to stop there, and what's behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while, you get too far down in the quicksand.
Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me.
'Downward Spiral' felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.
My life has been many examples of shortsighted goals that I thought would fix things. You know, if there's something broken inside me, if there's a hole in there, I thought: If I could just write a good song someday, then I'd be OK. You know, if I could just be on stage in front of people I'd never seen before and be validated by them.
A lot of what I've done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough, and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise - the idea being if you can get behind that wall, you find there's a pearl inside.
Balance is good, because one extreme or the other leads to misery, and I've spent a lot of my life at one of those extremes.
I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy.
In my nothing, you were everything, to me.
Books are better than movies because you design the set the way you want it to look.
I've become impossible, holding on to when everything seemed to matter more.
iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up.
I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything.
You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.
The reality is that people think it's okay to steal music.
When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.
'Yeezus,' I really love it. I think the sound of it is cool.
You know, if nobody knows who you are, nobody's going to buy your record.
This isn't meant to last. This is for right now.
I foolishly thought that if I just 'made it' then everything would be okay. And everything wasn't okay.
I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes.
I thought my goal in life was to be in a successful band, and I had got that, but I was as miserable as I had ever been, and I couldn't understand why that would be.
Jumping through any hoop or taking advantage of any desperate situation that comes up just to sell a product is harmful. It is.
If I go onstage, I want to give people everything they want and more. I'll wash their car for them on their way out.
I was never a Lime Wire guy because it's too much hassle to find the song.
I thought I'd reached the bottom a few times, but then I'd realise there was another 30 floors of despair below that.
To me, rock music was never meant to be safe. I think there needs to be an element of intrigue, mystery, subversiveness. Your parents should hate it.
The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
When I first played 'Wolfenstein 3D,' it blew my mind. It had a big impact on me.
I used to buy vinyl. Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.
Nine Inch Nails is like building an army to go conquer. We build it, then we play, and we have to play so much to validate building it, financially. It leads to getting burn-out because a tour that would be fun if it lasted three weeks has to last 15 weeks.
When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes.
I found that when I was putting my own music out, with my Twitter feed as the pure marketing budget, I'm preaching to the choir.
I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.
I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.
I miss how a record label can help spread the word that you have something out.
In Nine Inch Nails, I've been the guy calling the shots since inception. I'd gotten used to that.
And when the day arrives I'll become the sky and I'll become the sea and the sea will come to kiss me for I am going home. Nothing can stop me now.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think music should be free.
I had to come to terms about becoming an addict, which, for a long time, I lied to myself about the status of until I couldn't lie any more, 'cause I was either going to die or get better.
Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve.
My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio - pretty mainstream stuff. Rolling Stone was probably as edgy as it got.
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