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Listening Quotes

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Listening Quotes

“[Buckminster Fuller] was quite willing to talk. He'd talk at the drop of a hat.I learned to talk in front of people by listening to the way he did things. Because he would give lessons in how to lecture. He would say, "Never take a note, just stand up and start babbling. And then eventually you're going to be able to make some coherent statements, and so it's like you're vamping. And then people will gradually start to listen to you when this spot of logic shows up in this torrent of verbiage.”

“I think, here's what I've realized from interviewing people, and I've been very open about my Catholicism and my love of Christ and I don't care who knows it but I don't do it on stage. People that disagree with me that are listening to my podcast that are not Christian, I'm not trying to sell them Christianity and I make it very clear.”

“My feeling about young people who want to pursue a career is - the first thing is do your homework on where it all started. Go back and look at history. Look at why the shows you are loving today happened and the artists you are listening to happened. And do your homework on history. Whether it's musical movies, musical plays, Broadway musical recordings - do your homework! And then, that way you will have an understanding of why, now, certain movies, certain plays, certain musicals are making some sort of sense.”

“I just always wanted a platform. In the past, I always dreamed of having a following and a fan base - you know, a group of people just listening and paying attention to what I was making. I think the reality kicked in that you have to make a living so that you have enough time to keep creating, you know? 'Cause if you're not making a living at this, then you're making a living working another job, and if you're working another job, you're spending all your time doing that and can't put enough time into the music.”

“I brought something back from those experiences [with drugs] which made me softer, open to other ideas. And I've learned from listening to other people talk about their experiences, from listening to Bill Hicks or reading Terrence McKenna or Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. But there's always some dumb cop out there who says "We don't need another legal drug and there's psychological addiction and blah blah blah."”

“The vicious cycle of violence is real. But if people simply stopped listening to their ignorant parents, their biased religions, their corrupt government and the prejudicial media, change would be quite easy. All it takes is courageous, fearless, unique individuals to make substantive change in this world. Unfortunately, there are very few courageous and fearless people.”

“I am being very humble about the Arab Spring. There's kind of a competition out there, you might have noticed, of who can be the first to say the Arab Spring is going to fail. Everyone says, "I told you so, I told you so about the Muslim Brotherhood." I have no desire to tell anyone anything. I don't know. I'm just listening, watching. It may turn out all these people are right, they may be wrong. They may be right this year and wrong next year, by the way. I'm just trying to listen day to day, figure it out.”

“When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.”

“Personally, I think that my father's ministry does have some effect on one. I perhaps thought I wasn't listening that well, but I could almost recite his sermons. He had the old-fashioned preaching style of chanting. He would explain a point and then there would be this pitch to excite the audience because people would eventually shout and respond to what he was saying.”

“What I've learned from my gurus is that when you hear music, you hear a person, or you hear people, and you hear everything about them in those moments. They reveal themselves in ways that cannot be revealed any other way, and it contains historical truths because of that. To me, that is the most important thing. It shouldn't be a footnote, or the last chapter. It should be the complete thesis about a book on listening.”

“Growing up from Nirvana to all the bands I was listening to at the teenage time, those were my best friends, more than my real friends. Those were the people that sang me to sleep or gave me the confidence I needed to go to first period. When we're all so insecure with weird stuff, when we're having weird feelings toward girls or guys, or whatever. It's the insecurity of life that we all go through. So music helped me.”

“We also need to look at precedent before making these decisions. Instead of listening to Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric, we should look at how he's behaved. The fact is he's been making concessions recently. He gave up his nuclear weapons. He allowed hundreds of Americans to evacuate Tripoli. Did he crack down on his people who revolted? Yes, but that's not so unusual. For me, it's always a failure of diplomacy. Our willingness to immediately turn to a military solution is disturbing.”

“I'm not an intimate of Donald Trump, but I have great instincts about people, and I have fairly good skill at sizing people up, and it's not phony. You can tell when somebody's talking to you and not really hearing you. I've been around powerful people ask me what I think about things, and I can tell they're not really listening. They just asked, to ask, try to score points that way. Trump listens. But you don't get the impression that he's listening from a position of indecisiveness, indecision or confusion. I've never met anybody with the energy this guy's got, either.”

“Listening closely to songs these days, there's a lot of lazy songwriting where people get away with it. I don't want to be too critical about it. But I also feel like I wanted to say something a bit different from just being a musician and singing about yourself. Ultimately, that's not really interesting to me. Even when I was a kid, I was interested in observing people and maybe making my own stories. That kind of reflects in my music.”

“When I was listening in on the phone call where Andre Leon Talley was saying that he was going to get my fat, black ass on the cover of a magazine. I think that - you know, Andre Leon Talley is fat and black. And it hurt my feelings. It hurt my feelings. But it also was a lesson in this is what they think, and this is what they will always think. And there's no way of being too talented or too pretty or too confident around it. People will still have their opinions.”

“The most influential person in the room isn't the one who is being a bully, talking loudly, and imposing him- or herself on others. Surrendered people understand that true power comes from being respectful and listening. Surrendered people know themselves and are empathetic toward others. They don't measure themselves by how much they are liked, nor do they compete for attention. When they sit quietly in a room, others always seem to come to them.”

“I think people take Blink-128 more seriously now than they did before. And it's largely our fault because we called our records Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. We were always kind of the underdogs, especially critically. People wrote us off as this joke band. But the people who listened to Blink knew that we were silly and whatever, but we wrote songs about divorce and suicide and depression. Those kids that were listening to Blink are now the ones that control all these outlets that used to just write us off.”

“I support people if they are called to be active and protesting, resisting, working for restoration or, for more just political conversation. I also support everyone in listening to each other. We're at a very interesting and disturbing time in terms of our civil discourse. And yet always, in disturbance, things are shook up and that shaking can lead to deeper maturity and a deeper discourse. May it be so.”

“Hillary Clinton was in rural America during the Iowa caucuses, but I think the nature of a campaign makes it more difficult once you become the candidate. There's a messaging opportunity here throughout, not just in the election season, but before the election, the opportunity to underscore what government is doing in a positive way in partnership with rural folks. I think it's a messaging issue. It's being there physically, talking to folks, listening to people, respecting and admiring what they do, and then making sure that they understand precisely what the partnership is.”

“People ask me if I'm influenced by British music, and I suppose I grew up listening to mostly British music - from new wave stuff through to heavy metal. Like, when I got into metal, it was Black Sabbath. I never really got into a lot of American rock. I appreciate some of it, but not much! Most of the great new wave music was coming out of Britain, and Germany. So maybe those influences have made their way into my music, and perhaps that's why I have this connection with people in Europe. But maybe it's something cosmic.”

“I think that there's an idea in 2016 that if a woman doesn't have it all then she's lacking in some way, and I think that 'having it all' is the kid, the relationship and the career, and that seems horribly skewed. I get genuinely excited when I meet women - or men - who don't want to have children. It's refreshing and unusual and means they're not swayed by what society has told them, they're just listening to their own basic instincts. I love meeting people who are fulfilled by other things. I think, 'lucky old you' when I meet someone single.”

“About 95% of the people listening to me agree with me. But I can continue to work with half or 30 or 20% of the audience hating me. In fact, one of the things I've had to do psychologically, in order to thrive, I've had to learn how to take being reviled and hated as a sign of success. Most people are not raised - I certainly wasn't - to want to be hated. I can only think maybe one or two people who were. Hitler. Maybe somebody else. Maybe Saddam.”

“One of the most important things in any leader or in any successful approach is to focus on connecting with people and really listening to them. We shouldn't just be saying, oh yes, the people are protesting. We need to ask them why they are protesting and try and figure out if there is something we can do to bring them in and respond to those concerns. That's not populism - that's being thoughtfully open to the fact that our citizens are allowed to have, and are even justified in having, very real concerns and questions for the people responsible for serving them.”

“I've been listening to a lot of gospel. I think it's the most beautiful kind of music. Just thinking about a group of people on a Sunday morning - no drugs, no partying, just connecting with a higher power. Then there's usually a choir joining together on one or two mics, creating this soulful music. So the recording captures the spirit that comes through.”

“I was full of energy, and I had a lot of bottled up rage that would come out in my stage performances. It was therapy sessions for someone who couldn't afford to go to therapy, a way to release my frustration, my inhibition. When I was little, growing up in an abusive household, I felt like I didn't have a voice. Suddenly I was on stage and people were watching me and listening to me, so even if I was singing about something that didn't have to do with abuse, when I was on stage I could express all of the anger, the rage.”

“I am not really thinking, I am just, working with the music. And people have asked me, why don't you say more, or why do you not have singers, or why don't you sing? I think it's because, if I would have words for what I am doing, I I could write. But I really don't. It's a whole different thing. And I think it's one of the beauty of instrumental music is that it can be background. It can be what people call "easy listening." But it's really one of those things where it's as much as you are willing to give it.”

“I'm obsessed with this idea of storytellers and people who have a narrative, and sometimes sustain a relationship because they're telling a narrative and someone is listening to that. Often the nature of the relationship is determined by how well they tell the story, or someone else's ability to suspend disbelief, or infuse into their narrative something which they may not even be aware of.”

“To get large groups of people to dance, there needs to be something accessible about the music. The beat can't be too esoteric, but unless we're talking about prog or etherealist composition, I think there's something simplistic about most music. What's completely insane to me is that people would consider music that's simple to be dumbed-down. Couldn't simplicity be a deliberate, smart choice? Those people aren't really listening; they're judging a song off of a beat, off of a pulse.”

“I think people assume that whatever kind of music you make is the music you listen to. Don't get me wrong, I listen to tons of pop music and all the music that really inspires Best Coast is very straightforward '50s and '60s pop music, but I've been listening to R&B and rap since I was a kid. I grew up in L.A. It's part of the culture. I listen to anything.”