Michael Stipe Quotes

AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the ’80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex.

For me, as a music fan, visuals kind of steal away the purity of the song. My instinct is not to provide a visual to go with a piece of music. But here’s MTV. It’s really powerful.

The world of WONDERLAND is authentic, vibrant, and genuine. Stacey D’Erasmo explores the delight and terror of second chances. A great read!

I’m not homosexual, I’m not hetrosexual, I’m just sexual.

To be called an elder statesman is so unbelievably insulting.
Brad Pitt is exactly three years younger than me.

I’m tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.

For every great thing we did, there is a very public moment of falling on our faces. But everything that came through us as a band was a distinct vision of R.E.M.

When we first started, we were a band from Athens and that was so off the map.

So, we just kind of created our own thing and that’s part of the beauty of Athens: is that it’s so off the map and there’s no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.

In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the ’60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

I’m just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I’ve written about.

I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.