126 Quotes by Elliott Smith

I think the music business will eventually crush me, but I [smiles]... I'm ready.

I liked the idea of a self-contained, endless pursuit of perfection. But I have a problem with perfection. I don't think perfection is very artful. But there's something I liked about the image of a skater going in this endless twisted circle that doesn't have any real endpoint. So the object is not to stop or arrive anywhere; it's just to make this thing as beautiful as they can.

I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not. But like when I see a movie, for example, that I really like, that moves me or whatever, it's usually happy and sad at the same time.

Somewhere where people aren't so mad would be nice, but I don't know if there is anywhere like that.

Everybody gets a tag. If you listen to a Velvet Underground record, you don't think, 'Godfathers of Punk.' You just think, 'This sounds great.' The tags are there in order to help try to sell something by giving it a name that's going to stick in somebody's memory. But it doesn't describe it. So 'depressing' isn't a word I would use to describe my music. But there is some sadness in it -- there has to be, so that the happiness in it will matter.

Music is worth doing just because. It doesn’t have to be justified by some political point of view, and it’s kind of insulting to the music to make it a tool for something else.

I truly hope the future will bring me something to feel nostalgic about, because there's really nothing much so far I can remember fondly.

Haven't laughed this hard in a long time. I better stop now before I start crying. Go off to sleep in the sunshine...I don't want to see the day when its dying.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television,