Quotes from Regina Spektor

I'm like, 'Would you be the person in the room that would boo when Dylan went electric? I know I wouldn't. Or are you the person that left The Beatles after 'She Loves You,' or 'Drive My Car?' You weren't on board for 'Revolution 9' or 'Day In The Life,' were you?'

I knew all this Beatles music. I knew the songs phonetically. It was like my whole experience of that music was out of focus, and somebody put the perfect glasses on me, and all of a sudden I could see everything.

This is the way I wanna die. Torn apart by angry fans who want me to play a different song.

A man destined to hang can never drown

Every morning I wake up with a purpose and a smirk

God, our world is so complicated.

No one laughs at God in a hospital.

No one's laughing at God -We're all laughing with God.

It feels very good to sing in Russian. It feels so good inside my body.

I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know any more if this is the awesomest way to live.

I'm like, 'Would you be the person in the room that would boo when Dylan went electric? I know I wouldn't. Or are you the person that left The Beatles after 'She Loves You ' or 'Drive My Car?' You weren't on board for 'Revolution 9' or 'Day In The Life ' were you?'

I'd always wanted to work in the studio and experiment with sounds. Things that I'm really influenced by and that I love are like The Beatles and Radiohead, and all those records by bands whose music is really involved.

The only thing they really get to pick is the single. But I get to pick the producer, the songs on the record, the final masters, the artwork. Basically, I hand them a record.

We don't have a lot of power in the world, right? We can only control so many things. It allows you to curate your own emotional and artistic intake of life.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

I would really hate it if I could call up Kafka or Hemingway or Salinger and any question I could throw at them they would have an answer. That's the magic when you read or hear something wonderful - there's no one that has all the answers.

You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.

I always have kind of a few books going at the same time.

There's an artist that I listened to for the first time, and I really didn't like them. I had some kind of adverse reaction, and later, it became my favorite thing.

I write a tiny fraction of what I used to write. My only job used to be to just write songs, and that was a really nice job to have, but only a tiny amount of people heard those songs, and I didn't make a living from it, and eventually I begged my parents to let me move back into my room.

Taking steps is easy Standing still is hard... Everything is different The second time around.

Tomorrow you might get a phone call about something wonderful and you might get a phone call about something terrible.

I just like being all over the place and writing whatever comes to mind. Having the tools? It's such a gift.