Sufjan Stevens Quotes

I love kissing. If I could kiss all day, I would. I can’t stop thinking about kissing. I like kissing more than sex because there’s no end to it. You can kiss forever. You can kiss yourself into oblivion. You can kiss all over the body. You can kiss yourself to sleep. And when you wake up, you can’t stop thinking about kissing. Dammit, I can’t get anything done because I’m so busy thinking about kissing. Kissing is madness! But it’s absolute paradise, if you can find a good kisser.

Art is… a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation.

It’s traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don’t experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It’s all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.

There’s nothing cutting edge about what I’m trying to do. I’m not creating a new sound. I’m not like Bjork, who’s an alien from another world. I’m of the earth. You could extract any measure of music out of anything I’ve ever done and you could find its affiliations in music history.

It’s a mystical quality of music, that music isn’t really concrete, and it’s communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music’s like that. It’s not real. It’s unreal, it’s all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.

I’ve never known a man who loved me.

I no longer really have faith in the album anymore. I no longer have faith in the song.

When I live, I’ll give it all I’ve got.

Some of my music requires an obsessive-compulsive approach and a real embodiment of excessiveness. So I really have to live in that world of overstimulation. Sometimes I think it’s like a drug; more is more, and you can never get enough. The older I get, the more I crave that excessive aesthetic. It’s never going to satisfy me.

I still describe myself as a Christian, and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith.

There is nothing more incredible and moving and appealing than good music, and it cannot always be reduced to a story, to exposition. It’s so much more abstract and brilliant.

I quickly learned that you don’t have to be incarcerated by suffering, and that, in spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life.