Quotes from Glen Hansard

If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you're in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you'll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction.

I pick up my guitar and play. Something might come, and then the pen comes out. Then an edit, until something comes out that you're actually satisfied with.

What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.

You know, when I was a kid waiting on the bus, I remember that was when I imagined my life. I imagined everything that I was gonna be when I grew up and I imagined all of these amazing journeys and amazing people I'd meet. Of course, all of it has kind of come to fruition.

If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.

A song is like a saddle: you ride it for a while, and if it's the right kind of song you can sing it for the rest of your life.

I've always loved playing solo. I guess in a way I just feel blessed to be able to make music. My favorite thing is usually whatever I'm doing right there and then.

I guess in a way I just feel blessed to be able to make music.

Relationships can be about yourself, they can be about you and your god, you and your people, you and your family. It can be about a lot of different stuff. And it is.

Our imagination it is our greatest ally . . . Imagination is a very, very powerful thing. It literally invents the path before you.

Our imagination just needs space. It's all it needs, that moment where you just sort of stare into the distance where your brain gets to sort of somehow rise up.

I won't say I've closed the door on acting.

Do I create conflicts for myself? Sure I do.

I've always felt that if I ever got cynical, I would have to stop making music because I'd just be poisoning the air.

This weird thing that musicians have... it's got something to do with approval, and not feeling good enough, and therefore going out and being great somehow makes your life valid.

The moment of drifting into thought has been so clipped by modern technology. Our lives are filled with distraction with smartphones and all the rest. People are so locked into not being present.

Sometimes you give birth to something or you're part of a team that gives birth to an idea, and it grows and has a whole life of its own, and you feel grateful. It's just so humbling.

Sadness is a very interesting idea, this idea of sadness being some kind of default setting that artists will go into. And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness, and the idea that sadness is very loud, and happiness is quiet.

I choose to believe that there is good in people and that everything is a lesson. Our place on Earth is to go deeper, to somehow get wiser. To have spirit.

I only ever really take out my guitar when I'm miserable, which isn't necessarily a very good time to do it.

I'm not an actor, and I'll never call myself an actor. I've never thought of it as part of my life. I'll always be a singer, in my eyes.

As a busker, one thing that does not work is self-consciousness. A busker needs to be working. A busker needs to shed all ego and get down to work. Play your songs, play them well, earn your money, and don't get in people's way.

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

Sometimes travelling really intensely for a long time is like having a continuous nervous breakdown.