132 Quotes by Devendra Banhart

John Cage is someone I got into as a visual artist, before I even knew his music. I don't think a lot of people even know that he does visual art.

With music there's so many limbs and facets. Video and touring and merchandise and all those little things require attention. They're artist things but I tend to joke around too much with those things.

When I came home my parents were listening to Pakistani Qawwali music, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they're listening to music from Mali, like Ali Farka Toure, they're listening to Brazilian songwriters, like Gilberto Gil, to opera, to Neil Young even, things you don't hear as a kid in Caracas. I love all the music they turned me onto.

I've always lived in small places.

My interested in Brazilian music stemmed from wanting to find a musical identity other than the salsa and meringue that I was inundated with in Venezuela as a child.

I come from a school of artists, the Mission School in San Francisco, and there are a lot of artists I look up to.

I'm very lucky my parents were into different kinds of music.

No one's fearless. We're all full of fear. But can your fear guide you or lean into it, embrace it.

Well, love is a difficult thing to hold on to. It's a slippery little beast. It will hold you and then it will elude you at any moment.