Quotes from Jeff Buckley

I disoriented myself from everything about being a human being and just played and played and played and sang and sang and sang.

When I was 12, I decided to become a musician. 'Physical Graffiti' was the first album I ever owned.

I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13.

People have a certain perfection about them, no matter who they are. Like when Janis Joplin sang. Gorgeous!

I figured if I played in the no-man's land of intimacy, I would learn to be a performer.

They will accuse me of stealing from my father. They already stand in baited judgement, waiting for my first move, waiting to dump their loads of garbage on me.

Maybe I'm not a good enough artist that people just think of me. Maybe in the future, I'll bloom into something that will just make people look at me for what I am.

To young to hold on and to old to just break free and run.

When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we'd, like, 'wanna go against the norm, man.'

More than any other place, New York is where I felt I belonged. I prefer the Lower East Side to any place on the planet. I can be who I am there, and I couldn't do that anywhere I lived as a child. I never fit in when I lived in California, even though that's where my roots are.

The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.

I don't really need to be remembered. I hope the music's remembered.

Music is my mother and my father; it is my work and my rest...my blood...my compass...my love.

I don't write my music for Sony. I write it for the people who are screaming down the road crying to a full-blast stereo.

Time to write and sing, to laugh, to listen, to discover, to cry, to love music.

There is no good singing, there is only present and absent.

There's no time for hatred, only questions. Where is love? Where is happiness? What is life? Where is peace?

I've always liked the electric guitar better. Even though the acoustic can be a very sexy and mysterious instrument, I can go to way more places with an electric.

The Smiths hasn't been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.

I dunno... I feel out of step. Musically. Just out of step, not even behind or ahead. Just sort of like... I dunno, sometimes I feel like I'm still... just not... in sync. I don't know how to explain it. I just am.

I'm convinced I got signed because of who I am. And it makes me sad.

I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.

I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.

Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith, all dark, all romantic. When I say "romantic," I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn't know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song.