Top 66 John Grant Quotes

I feel uncomfortable when I think about my father listening to my records, because I don’t want to hurt him.

I don’t really listen to my old music.

I spend a lot of my time just looking at words and grammar and writing things down that I don’t know.

I think I have a great voice, but it’s not special enough to be remembered. But what’s special about me is much more than just my voice.

My mother was a very sweet soul and a beautiful person, but she had a lot of fear.

Do you know the solo at the end of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Any More?’ that sounds like a chainsaw breaking through? That is what I can’t do with my voice. That’s when you hear how painful this has been to me.

When I was young, people were so disgusted by me. Before I even knew that I was gay… everybody else had it figured out and, you know, they were letting you know.

There’s a lot of anger in ‘Queen of Denmark,’ and that’s me getting political.

I have to strip away all the layers when I’m writing the song. I have to cut through all these layers of years of putting up walls and putting protective layers around myself.

I would love to be part of a community.

I’m angry because I was so scared for so many years about just being myself.

If I had a good scream, like Frank Black, I’d be doing punk music, ‘cos I love that.

I had never considered myself a political guy, but there are certain things I can’t shut up about. When I hear people say things like, ‘If ‘we’ allow gays to marry, then people will want to marry animals and children,’ I can’t just stand there.

If I’m honest, I suppose there’s something I don’t want people to see in my eyes. They really are the window to the soul.

I can’t allow myself to censor myself.

I do feel I have a hard time dealing with things being OK.

It really was an amazing thing when Midlake brought me down to Texas and created an atmosphere in which I felt really safe and was able to do whatever I wanted artistically.

The only difficult thing is learning to recognise the interesting bits from those millions of moments life provides you with every day and writing down those snippets.

Part of what I do, after feeling invisible for a long time, is make an effort not to be invisible any more.

For me, every single thing I do seems to be about the process of letting go because that’s what I so desperately need to do with so many things: with fear, with what people think of me, and all these things I’ve worried about my whole life.

The 1980s were all about synths for me, and it never went away after that.

I just felt that I was going to fall apart if I didn’t learn to be myself.

I know I’m likeable, but living with me is different. Yes, I can be charming. That desire to please people and learning what to do to charm their socks off is something many of us do. But you get into a relationship, and the party’s over at some point. They see the real you.

I come from a position where it seems like I have an addictive quality to everything in my life.

I love that phrase that parents say to their children when they cry: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about.’

It’s always been my goal to have backing singers.

I was so ashamed of who I was. And I also felt like an outcast in gay society as well because I wasn’t good-looking enough; my body wasn’t good enough.

I seem to be very attracted to strong female personalities in acting and music.

I feel like, in the Czars, for example, I was afraid. I couldn’t express myself. I didn’t have a connection to myself. That’s one of the huge reasons why it was such a difficult existence. I put a lot of that on myself. I couldn’t access myself. I couldn’t look at myself, because I was too ashamed.

Reykjavik has a mixture of southern and northern mentality. There’s a laid-back, relaxed attitude but also the feeling things are going to get done.

I love patchwork quilts. But not in music.

Becoming a musician was all about escape. It was about getting away from the foulness that was me.

The lead character in ‘Adaptation’ is pretty much me but with more talent. Every time I watch ‘Adaptation,’ I feel very emotional because it makes me be kinder to myself and see the human situation a little more clearly.

I’ve kept most of my friends for decades, and I continue to make new friends.

The rejection I received when I was young for being a homosexual… that’s nothing compared to the number you do on yourself when you’ve been taught that you are not a human like other people.

I have trouble with things like Facebook. It presents such a warped vision. I get sick of people’s opinions about every little thing and this warped view that everyone is as happy as a pig in garbage.

I’m a seriously flawed individual, but I guess everybody is.

Madeline Kahn is one of my favourite people in the entire world and one of the funniest. She was a talented Broadway star and also sang opera.

If ‘Queen Of Denmark’ was about my childhood, then ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ is definitely about my adolescence, and that period was completely dominated by electronic music.

I’m quite gregarious. But when it comes to relationships, I mean, I’m no good at it. I suck at it. And people say I’m way too hard on myself, but I always feel like somebody else is going to say it if I don’t. Why not just beat them to the punch so it doesn’t hurt so much?

I can’t create music if I’m wearing a mask and not being myself, and that was the problem with The Czars.

I felt like a failure for so long because I wasn’t able to access myself in the way I knew I would have if I was going to make music that mattered. I knew I was going to have to learn how to be honest.

I’m not a big punk fan, but I love a good, solid screamer.

The lion’s share of what I listened to in the Eighties, what really affected me, was coming from Britain.

I loved the whole New Romantic, New Wave thing… New Order, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Blancmange, Yazoo.

Sometimes I wish I was one of those artists like David Bowie. They’re not putting their private lives out there; it’s about show and entertainment. But an alter ego is very dangerous for me. Because I am the guy who will become lost in that.

I’m not saying that I don’t have skills. I’m saying I don’t feel like I can use my skills to achieve self-esteem. I feel like it’s cheating. I think that I should have self-esteem simply because I am a human being who deserves love and deserves everything just as much or just as little as everyone else.

I don’t want to leave the house, and I don’t want to settle down.

When I reached my senior year in high school, I fell into a hole that took a couple of decades to get out of.

Most of the bad things that have happened to me happened in Denver.

Being embraced by the British people is a beautiful compliment for me. It feels very special.

I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.

I don’t let the computer into my bedroom. It would get in the way of life, sleep. And I really can’t let that happen.

I overthink everything.

I really do feel like music is the only thing that I can do.

It took me a long time to find my own voice, even after I started making my own music.

I think the humor, when applied in the right amount, only serves to intensify the other emotions in a given song; it highlights them, makes them stand out.

That inner narrative – the desire to understand the way I am – never really switches off.

I just feel like this guy who’s visiting the music business over the weekend. Every time I write a song, I feel like it’s never going to happen again.

In my family, I was loved, but only if I would fight this gay thing and not let it take over me. I would be loved unconditionally if I could be cured of my ‘sickness,’ but it certainly would not be OK if I couldn’t.

My music is definitely very personal. The songs are about moments, snapshots of everyday life, and about having one’s say, or at least feeling like one has had one’s say.

I don’t know about the totally happy album, though. I don’t know if that will ever come from me.

I still deal with triggers and neuroses that I’ve developed over the decades. But I do think I have a great amount of compassion for people who feel that they don’t fit in, or people who feel they have trouble finding their place in this world.

I’ve kept going to therapy to find out why my perspective is so skewered and why I’m filled with rage. It’s so I can live in this world alongside these other people who seem to be what is desired and what the world wants.

I don’t really experience much embarrassment.

I realized that a lot of the things I had been telling myself about not being good enough just weren’t true, and ‘Queen of Denmark’ gave me the chance to prove to myself that I could do something real.