Paul Westerberg Quotes

There is that unpredictability of the seasons that I enjoy. I like the threat of a tornado. I like the threat of four feet of snow.

Although, my experience when I've been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I'm too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you're halfway away from it.

Actually, I've done it the other way so many times where you rehearse the band and you do the whole thing with lights, the show and the crew - everything. Then you see what happens and you're already committed to dates. I'm just sort of putting out feelers this way.

Stick with your heart and you'll be fine.

The truth is overrated.

Nobody gets married to a clever song, let alone falls in love to one.

So I figured in keeping with the record, I'd do something off the wall which is show up for free and wing it ... I don't know, I'm just going to play some songs. I think it'll be fun.

The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.

We [The Replacements] never made any money on tour. None of us came out of the school of economics. We took it for granted that a rock and roll band gets ripped off. We've tried to shake that tree a couple of times, but what can we do? You look back, when you're sort of idle in your middle years, and think, we should have made some money.

I forever felt that I've fallen right between the crack of way too young for the first generation of classic rock 'n' roll and too old to be brand-new. It's hard.

I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.

If writers had a little more guts, maybe they wouldn't be writers.

By the fourth or fifth record there was not a lot of time to sit around. We [The Replacements] stopped rehearsing. We stopped getting together and rehearsing. We'd perform, and that would take it all out of us. Then we'd be done touring and we'd be sick of each other. We'd never call each other up and hang out.

I didn't wake up one morning and not be in the Replacements. We're all that forever, and I've just grown older. I mean, I haven't lost anything. I've gained a few things.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn't aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.

I'm constantly recording and playing down in the basement, and my voice is starting to sound really good. There's cracks and scratches in my voice that have been there since I was 19. It hasn't changed that much.

Try to free a slave with ignorance / Try and teach a whore about romance

Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.

Then again, I think about high school every day and I think about being a little kid every day too.

I think of the Replacements only when they're brought up to me. For two years, I'm at home, they don't really cross my mind. I still hear them on the radio. I'm not ashamed of anything we did.

We [The Replacements] formed as a rock and roll band, and that was the path we chose to take. Whenever we deviated from it we felt, unless everybody was into it, there was tension.

Some records are timeless, and some absolutely sound of their day.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a lot of great rock movies.

I think it should be evident by now, but I'm as lost as anyone.

I don't think there's anything that will make me stop doing it. There may be a time when it's not available to anyone. You may have to come listen at my basement window ... but I can't stop.

Having a diverse sense of taste - or lack of taste - I loved so many different things. I was drawn to the stupidity and excitement of glam, I had a thorough upbringing in rhythm and blues.

I'm not dissatisfied with my place in it rock 'n' roll.

A rock'n'roll band needs to be able to get under people's skin. You should be able to clear the room at the drop of a hat.

The sheer volumes of songs have come from the hours of cold and darkness that one spends inside with the lights on.

I'd been through crappy day jobs and stupid garage bands. I was determined to make it as a musician.

The ones that love us least, are the ones we'll die to please