Quotes from Conor Oberst

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

I always embrace the worst-case scenario.

Screaming is bad for the voice, but it's good for the heart.

I have on many occasions spoken my mind from stage. I have offered organizations table space by the merch booth. I have donated a dollar-a-ticket, or the entire guarantee, to different causes. I have registered voters. I have played on behalf of political candidates.

You can do a lot to shape the feeling of a song by the way you record it.

I think that, with anything creative, you should have the freedom to experiment, and that experimentation means not feeling totally responsible for how other people perceive it.

My favorite rhymes are sort of half-rhymes where you might just get the vowel sound the same, but it's not really a true rhyme. That gives you far more flexibility to capture the feeling you're trying to express. But sometimes it's best not to have any rhyme.

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.

They say it's better to bury your sadness in a graveyard or garden that waits for the spring to wake from its sleep and burst into green.

There's a small amount of super-wealthy people that want to maintain their billions and billions of dollars. Those are the people who are really making the decisions.

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing... one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand.

I went right from wunderkind to washed up. Old. Been around too long. That's just the way I feel. That's my internal dialogue.

My family is Catholic. I went to a Catholic school, that kind of thing, so that was my childhood for sure.

My main thing is just to keep writing. I've been doing some songwriting that's for my own record, I suppose.

And me I'm in the bathroom crying out my eyelids because it's hard to be a man when you're scared, just like a little kid.

I think in a lot of ways unconditional love is a myth. My mom's the only reason I know it's a real thing.

And in the morning when the sun rise. Look in the water, see the blue sky. As if heaven has been laid there at our feet.

I want to be enriched by the music I listen to. That's the reason it never really exists in the mainstream. Because that's not what most people are after.

I do think that music has a special ability to get behind enemy lines and win hearts and minds.

Hip-hop music has done a very good job of maintaining the political context, where they stand and not giving a sh-t what people think.

I'm not the most technically savvy person in the world. Like, I'm not good at troubleshooting when stuff happens to my digital music.

In a coma, you don't dream, you just hope that someone sits with you.

And your eyes must do some raining if you're ever gonna grow / When crying don't help, you can't compose yourself / It's best to compose a poem, an honest verse of longing / Or a simple song of hope.