Quotes from Tyler Joseph

You hear about our conservative background and know that we're Christian guys, but we're not timid at all. I will take anyone on when it comes to outworking them or putting on a better show or standing up for people who are being put down.

We do things differently. You don't have to worry about being part of a particular genre. You just go for it.

Music seems to hold everything together. It seems to make things not so chaotic sometimes. It seems to make things make more sense sometimes.

We know in order to get where we want to be and do what we want to be doing, sometimes we have to do what we don't feel like doing. It takes hard work, and the band name is a constant reminder of that.

Music can connect people on an intimate level. What Josh and I are trying to do is represent anyone who has some of the questions that we have.

Blurryface is this character that I came up with that represents a certain level of insecurity.

Writing songs is kind of like a wrestling match to me. You have to pin it down and make it do what you want it to do.

From the beginning, my songwriting was from writing in a journal; it was completely unfiltered. I don't know if I really meant to show everyone this side of me, but when I saw how people resonated to the things I was saying, some of the questions I was asking, I realized I was not alone.

I think one of the toughest things is that balancing act of trying to maintain relationships while being on the road.

We had so many friends who did the band thing, and one of their first moves was to go on tour, and they'd just blow all their money.

When Josh and I are recording a record, we're very mindful of how the music will manifest itself live. That's where we have to live every day. When we tour for the next record, I imagine there will be a new story to tell, and we'll introduce new characters.

I've forgotten what it feels like to be in one place for more than a day... But we signed up for this. This is our dream. We sat down and said this is what we want to do, play music and touring.

We've been lucky. Even as a young, local-level band, we were able to rise out of the local scene without having any debt, without having signed the wrong deal with the wrong manager or the wrong booker or a small label.

A lot of things you do to cover up insecurities can be just as harmful to you as anything else.

I don't love the way I look. Nobody does, and if they do, I don't want to be that person's friend. But we all know what we're insecure about. The question I had as I was writing was, 'How are these things affecting the way I live? How am I compensating because I don't like this about myself? What do I do to cover it up?'

I remember the first time I ever showed my parents a song that I had written. The content may have been a little darker than they were used to, or really introspective in a way that may have been uncomfortable. I thought they'd retaliate with some kind of judgment or concern about whether I was feeling all right, but they were proud of it.

I always wrote with some kind of angle of ignorance. I didn't know what was right or wrong.

One think that you notice about anyone that gets up on stage is that they don't really have a lot of self-awareness. It's kind of a trait that performers don't have because you just kinda just have to let go and do whatever you want to do on stage.

Self-awareness is a character trait that's horrible to have if you're a performer. I think that a lot of these performers that we see get up on stage and play music, there's a sense of them truly not caring how they're coming across. They are just themselves. I look up to a lot of people who are like that.

By the time you do what somebody else is doing, everybody has moved on to something else.

It doesn't matter what we post about ourselves on social networks or how many times we play live TV, even. It's all about those people, those fans who are telling other people about us.

We just want to outdo ourselves every time we come back somewhere.

For us, we make a song, and if we like it, it goes on a record.

There's been many times when a producer will say, 'I don't think you want to say that.' We were told we shouldn't be so brutally honest about songwriting or radio or the industry.