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Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

Rufus Wainwright

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Rufus Wainwright
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: July 22
Composer
Musician
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Rhinebeck (village)
New York
Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright
Write
Music
Writing
Idealized
Life
Explore
Songs
Vision
Use
Song

More quotes by Rufus Wainwright

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I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame.
Rufus Wainwright
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It seems like the older I get, the more unreal the world becomes.
Rufus Wainwright
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I have a lot of advantages: I'm not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn't abused as a child, so I'm doing okay!
Rufus Wainwright
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I think everybody identified at a pretty young age that I was fairly entranced with myself. And that I had to be tempered.
Rufus Wainwright
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I really do fear that I'm dying I really do fear that I'm dead I saw it in your eyes what I'm looking for I saw it in your eyes what will make me live.
Rufus Wainwright
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Writing an opera and premiering in England, you could say I was going right into the eye of the storm and I came out successfully. A little tattered and bruised, but so what, I made it.
Rufus Wainwright
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My mother and father could not handle even me being gay. We never talked about it really.
Rufus Wainwright
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But I want to deepen as an artist, and working with Shakespeare definitely points in that direction.
Rufus Wainwright
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Everything I do, I feel is genius. Whether it is or it isn't.
Rufus Wainwright
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I've written songs for Shirley Bassey, Marianne Faithfull, and Linda Thompson. I sort of focus on these wonderful, aging divas. But maybe that's because I think I'm Christina Aguilera.
Rufus Wainwright
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I will take my coffee black / never snack / hang with the wolves who are sheepish.
Rufus Wainwright
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I made the decision to take on board the critical feedback. Reviews are something you can easily ignore as a performer or writer but I chose to not ignore them here and I think that I benefited. I think I'm stronger for it - and I have a tougher skin as a result.
Rufus Wainwright
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I may not lead the most dramatic life, but in my brain it's 'War and Peace' everyday.
Rufus Wainwright
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I just think it's better to have ideas. I mean, you can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier, people die for them, people kill for them.
Rufus Wainwright
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Let the little fairy in you fly!
Rufus Wainwright
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I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.
Rufus Wainwright
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I'd be hanging out in my bathrobe all day, stinky, just writing, and my mom allowed me to do this-as long as I was writing songs. She said, 'As long as you're seriously working on music, I'll support you. Don't get a job, because if you work, it will crush you.
Rufus Wainwright
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The song is about knowing the end result of every situation you're in, and being able to play it out in your mind and see it before it happens. It's about addiction, really, about knowing how it's all going to end up. In that sense, you're watching a movie of yourself all the time - and then you want out of that movie.
Rufus Wainwright
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One of the main destructive forces within our family has been these runaway egos. I think if you look at any show business family, that struggle exists.
Rufus Wainwright
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The artist who gave me the most inspiration and direction, especially as a singer - and I absolutely consider myself a singer, 100 percent - is Nina Simone. She's my ultimate pianist-singer-type person.
Rufus Wainwright