Quotes from Jeff Buckley

The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It's worth being bashed against. It's worth getting scarred by. It's worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.

Thinking so hard on her soft eyes and memories of the signs that it's over. It's over.

Maybe someday, I'll just make, like, a complete on-demand record that everybody wants to hear. But that would be impossible and, also, I just changed my mind. I don't think I'll ever do that.

I have a lot of my mother in me, but I was just born with the same parts as my father. I don't sound like him. I mean, I can do an impression of him right now, and I do not sound like him. I sound like me. My sense of rhythm I learned from my mother. My melodies, I think sometimes, I get from my mother.

I once took a ride to the beach in L.A., and all along the shore there were all these so-called jazz places. And I saw these college guys and session players playing this fusion Muzak stuff. It was just a lot of notes, and the more notes they played, the more it kept them from expressing anything. So I came back home and got out my Zeppelin albums.

I'm actually the son of Mary Guibert. My mother was born in the Panama Canal zone and came to America when she was five with my grandmother and grandfather, and that was the family I knew. Everybody sang; everybody had songs all the time, and they loved music.

Sensitivity isn't being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom. I enjoy a lot of mystery.

I think that all people are many people. I think all people have many, many, many different souls inside, and they just shift from one to the other.

I like a spirituality with a God that knows how to drive a car, that knows how to take his girl to the dance club, dance all night, have a little drink, kiss the kid when they come back in and go to sleep. God doesn't need a chauffeur - he needs to drive himself.

The music business is the most childish business in the world. Nobody knows what they're selling or why, but they sell it if it works.

All music industry places are the same, really. They have the same dynamics and the same concerns and the same needs.

There are times when what you do will be mysterious to everyone... times when you have to change directions before people are ready. Just because someone does something that critics don't like or understand doesn't mean you're failing as a musician. It probably means you're growing.

The music comes from within and outside. Within is the big mystery of life; we've all got it.

I'm concerned with the future. I'm concerned with my life, my present, my friends, people I love, people who love me. I have no intention of taking on a legacy that wasn't bestowed on me.

I made a statement all my own.

What I'm trying to do is just sing what comes to my body in the context of the song. And if you go by the emotion of the song, it's almost like stepping into a city. Cities have certain customs and rules and laws you can break, and that's what I was doing.

I am very observant of people's character.

My personal aesthetic is to be affected directly by everything about what you're seeing… I don't mind being dashed on the rocks… My most base act of defiance is to live a long time and still rock.

There was a time when I stopped singing, between 16 and 19, but that was done on purpose, maybe as a punishment, maybe as a cure.

I don't see people. I don't see men and women at all. When I see them, I see... their mothers and fathers. I see how old they are inside. Like when I look at the president, or anybody in a record company, or a store owner, I may see a little boy behind the counter with the face of an old man. And that's who I talk to.

I'm not 'Grace.' That album is like a brick onto itself. It's like a coffin that I put certain feelings and observations in so that they can be capsulized forever. I wanted to put them there so I would be free to move on.

I do like structure, and I'd love to be better at it.

Words are really beautiful, but they're limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there's nothing to hang onto. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is.

I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship.