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My music is just about story telling. I don't have much to say, and I'm not trying to change anyone's mind. I'm just singing through conviction about what I love and what I care about, starting with the very small.

Sufjan Stevens

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Sufjan Stevens
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 1
Banjoist
Composer
Guitarist
Musician
Oboist
Pianist
Record Producer
Saxophonist
Singer-Songwriter
Detroit
Michigan
Mind
Anyone
Love
Story
Stories
Change
Conviction
Care
Starting
Music
Telling
Trying
Singing
Much
Small

More quotes by Sufjan Stevens

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I like residing in abstraction.
Sufjan Stevens
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I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.
Sufjan Stevens
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I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
Sufjan Stevens
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Tuesday night at the Bible study we lift our hands and pray over your body, but nothing ever happens.
Sufjan Stevens
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My siblings and I were raised like tenants, to be honest. There was a total absence of intimacy in my family, though there was still a great deal of camaraderie among the kids. Things were set up almost like a business, and it had to be managed that way because we were really poor, and there were a lot of mouths to feed.
Sufjan Stevens
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Fiction has always been a thorn in my side, because I've always wanted to be a writer but I can't seem to really do it.
Sufjan Stevens
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Growing up on the border there, we were always frustrated with people's pronunciations of towns in Michigan, and people mispronouncing Illinois. There are all these Native American words that no one really knows how to pronounce.
Sufjan Stevens
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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.
Sufjan Stevens
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Pro Tools is an incredible resource. I think it's enabled me to do things that I wouldn't have been able to do without this kind of computer editing.
Sufjan Stevens
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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.
Sufjan Stevens
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If there's any kind of morality, for me, it's about reality what is reality? I have a hard time distinguishing what is valuable when it comes to the real world and the fantasy world. Like, should I invest my time in the ordinary world or the imaginary world?
Sufjan Stevens
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I was feeling privileged and self-conscious about my life as a musician, which feels self-absorbed. I can't help it, I am a musician. This is what I do.
Sufjan Stevens
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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.
Sufjan Stevens
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I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there.
Sufjan Stevens
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Public school felt like prison - cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, metal lockers. It was so sterile and unstimulating.
Sufjan Stevens
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One of my strongest memories is my father playing bongos in the living room in Detroit listening to Motown radio. He was this skinny white bald guy, but he was really moved by blues and Motown and funk.
Sufjan Stevens
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We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.
Sufjan Stevens
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We live in a world that is cruel to the earth itself. Man is a biological terrorist.
Sufjan Stevens
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A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.
Sufjan Stevens
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I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.
Sufjan Stevens