Trent Reznor Quotations | Page 2

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen is, 'Oh, I'm on stage playing a song,' because you're daydreaming about something else, you're on autopilot. You have to fight that.

I do remember my first purchase: the Partridge Family's 'Greatest Hits.' I got it for $3.99 at a failed chain of pre-Wal-Mart-type stores called Jamesway. God, I'm old.

I need boundaries. In the modern studio there are a bunch of instruments around me, and I can simulate anything I can't play, so sometimes the palette feels too big.

I watch people, friends of mine, and see how they portray themselves online and I find interesting that it's kind of a hyper-real version of yourself, how you'd like to be seen, in a way.

My dad and I are best friends. He's pretty much responsible for the way I turned out. He would provide a little artistic inspiration here and there in the form of a guitar, stuff like that.

In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in - Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff - there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.

Nine Inch Nails was born out of Cleveland, Ohio, with me and a friend in a studio working on demos at night. Got a record deal with a small, little label, went on tour in a van, and a couple years later found that somehow we touched a nerve, and that first record resonated with a bunch of people.

I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?

Nine Inch Nails is like building an army to go conquer. We build it, then we play, and we have to play so much to validate building it, financially. It leads to getting burn-out because a tour that would be fun if it lasted three weeks has to last 15 weeks.

The band Grizzly Bear, I think they're excellent. There's a beauty and a musicality there that I wish would have been in vogue in the late '80s, when I was forming bands.

The idea of politics is just so uninteresting to me - I've never paid much attention to it. I don't believe things can really change. It doesn't matter who's president. Nothing really gets resolved. I don't know. I guess that's not the right attitude to take.

When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.

You're standing onstage in a sold-out arena with people singing your music, and you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Because here's a party that, essentially, it's for you. And you still somehow feel like you don't belong there. Those people all have their lives and go back home.

If there used to be 100 people at a major working on a record, now there are 18, but they're the good ones. There's a lean, mean hunger.

I don't have a family. I'd like to have one. I just haven't somehow gotten around to it yet.

I miss how a record label can help spread the word that you have something out.

I tend to not listen to my own music when I'm not working on it. No real reason other than it's nice to get away from it.

I think it's just an awkward time right now to be a musician.

I'm sure there is a group of people that assume Nine Inch Nails is just noise and chaos - or whatever it might be dismissed as, and sometimes is.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think music should be free.

My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio - pretty mainstream stuff. Rolling Stone was probably as edgy as it got.

Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.

When fame presented itself to me, I was not at a point in my life where I was equipped to deal with it.

When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes.

You know, if nobody knows who you are, nobody's going to buy your record.

I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.

I often find myself listening to a record because a lot of people or magazines have told me it's good and I'm supposed to like it, and I try to stay in touch with what's happening and I'm also a fan of music. I find myself trying to like something that I really don't think is that great.

It's easy to get lost in the shuffle, and just enticing people to hear the music for free doesn't mean that much when everyone else is essentially doing the same thing on MySpace, or wherever.

After coming from a major label, I realized the entire business has been decimated, and you can't look to labels to try to figure it out because they don't even use the technology, and they're oblivious to how people consume music these days.

I think the reason I was 23 before I ever wrote a song was that I was afraid of testing myself. What would I do if I discovered I didn't have anything to say?

The 'Downward Spiral' album was a record all about beating everybody up - and then 'Hurt' was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn't have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.

Anyone who's an executive at a record label does not understand what the Internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact - no idea. I'm surprised they know how to use e-mail.

Being in a band with my wife, I'm very aware of the multitude of ways that can go wrong. We're best friends and are interested in the same things, so it's natural to make music together.

It's one thing to sit back and say, 'Hey let's play a club, that will be great,' but then you get there and say, 'Hey wait, this is the dressing room? Where's my dressing room?'

Now that I have a thousand albums in my car all the time, I listen to more music. I was too lazy; I always had the same five discs in there. I'd never think to change it.

People want to listen to a lot of music and do whatever they want with it. They don't want DRM, they don't want subscriptions. They don't want a player that only can do this but can't do that and you only have one copy. They don't want that. You know? I don't want that.

Spotify - I met those guys before they launched in America and was wildly excited about the idea. 'Wow, this is all the music in the world, for a flat fee.'

Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.

What I was concerned about when I wrote the 'Downward Spiral' record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else.

When I'm writing music, I'm not playing a character. I'm not Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons or someone like that, who has acknowledged that they are writing music for a character.

one that was the antithesis of 'The Fragile,' which was complex. Songs flowed into each other, and it was layered. This record I wanted to be as stripped down as possible. I wanted it to be more real, more organic, not overly fixed or chopped up. At the end of the day, it reminds me of 'Pretty Hate Machine.'

My God sits in the back of the limosine. My God comes in a wrapper of cellophane. My God pouts on the cover of the magazine. My God's a shallow little bitch trying to make the scene.

I had plenty of life experience to draw from while working on this record, ... I was getting sane while the world was going crazy.

I get involved with the set design, lighting and the use of film because I always hated seeing bands in arenas. They usually suck. You're not meant to see rock shows there. You're meant to see a basketball game. In approaching the idea of arenas, I asked, 'What can I do in arenas I can't do elsewhere?' I tried to make it unique, help frame the music, and make it more like theater, so it starts at one place and winds up at another.

Here's what's up, no bullshit. Jerome came to me and said, 'My heart is pounding and I'm having chest pains'. We're all kind of freaked out back here.

Just spent the day discussing touring up through next summer, then played our asses off to the least responsive audience I can ever remember playing to. As I'm walking to the bus to leave Sacramento as soon as I can, I learn Jerome is back in the hospital. I have no idea what this means.

Just because technology exists where you can duplicate something, that doesn't give you the right to do it. There's nothing wrong with giving some tracks away or bits of stuff that's fine. But it's not everybody's right. Once I record something, it's not public domain to give it away freely.

We know we cannot stop all ticket reselling, but if we can redirect some of that unauthorized margin to a good cause like the Innocence Project, it makes me feel like we have done something worthwhile.

Touring in the past, the show was just something you had to do to get to the after-show,

When I was growing up, rock & roll helped give me my sense of identity, but I had to search for it.

We've put extra effort into developing this program as an effective way to ensure that Nine Inch Nails fans get into the show with the best possible tickets. The only complaints will be from scalpers and those who want to put our true fans at a disadvantage.

Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.

I spent a long time experimenting, saying, 'Here's a record that's free, or $5 if you want a nice version or $250 if you'd like a really nice coffee-table thing.' Everything felt like the right thing to do at the time and then six months later would feel tired. And I would feel tired. So that's one reason for returning to a major label.

I sit down to write a song and it's just me just trying to be as honest as I can for myself and to see that something you connect with, someone in the outside world, is a really cool feeling.

I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.

You told me you'd never make me cry. Now I'm slipping on the tears you've made me cry. Why does it come as a surprise? To think I was so naive. Maybe it didn't mean so much to you, but it meant the world to me.

I just want something I can never have.

I can't begin to tell you what a difficult job it is to replace your drummer in this band.

Alex is doing great and fitting in well,

The entire secret to the world is some drummers can play with click tracks and some can't,

And now, the day revolves around the show. It's a different mindset. You know, the rest of the guys in the band aren't sober. They're wild men in their own ways, and that leads to the isolation factor. But I'm not feeling particularly bad about it and I'm doing everything I can to take care of myself.

It's kind of a miracle to think that a device in your pocket can play pretty much any song that the world has ever created.

To switch right into creativity usually takes a bit of time, and this came up right at that juncture where I thought, okay, here's an opportunity to work with somebody I really respect in a new medium.

Nine Inch Nails was an experiment with me in discipline. I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything. Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting. I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100 percent, because I had never reached true failure.

Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.

Perfect little dream, The kind that hurts the most.

The least responsive audience I can ever remember playing to.

I thought Big Sur would be a great break after the tour. You'd walk down this rickety ladder to this not-very-pretty beach scene; crashing waves, moss-covered rocks, weird ocean life. It was scary. It summed up alot of things in my life, like 'I should be enjoying this, but I'm not.

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organised religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.

Grammy asshole weekend in LA. Yuck ... The Grammys = the old guard / old media propping up their puppets trying to convince the outside world (and each other) they're relevant.

My moral standing is lying down.

Being human is a lot more difficult than being on tour.

When I was around Bowie, I was nearing the bottom. When we were touring together, I looked at him as a kind of big-brother figure and I also looked at him as somebody I had a lot of respect for. The age and the period he's at in his life, I'd like to be there some day. He has a kind of content peace about him that's something to shoot for.

I'm just trying to figure out the right balance between making fans feel good and also maintaining some dignity for myself in the process.

I didnt ask to save rock, I dont even like rock that much.

There's nothing like a stressful day.

Live interaction with a crowd is a cathartic, spiritual kind of exchange, and its intensified at a festival.

I didn't want to be in a Pepsi commercial with R2-D2 sitting on my shoulder.

I become irritated when I am being written off as aloof or stand-offish when I'm shy and don't know what to say.

One of my biggest heroes and people I was fortunate enough to be around is David Bowie. I look at his career, and he always had the balls to break things that weren't broken, to step away from something and try something new, at risk of failing.

All I've undergone I will keep on.

My experience with being on a record label over the years has been when both of your agendas are in sync, and they're the same goal, it's great to have another army of people and resources and money. But most of the time, they're not the same. Their agenda is just simply to sell plastic discs at any cost, and yours is to preserve - at least in my case - your integrity, and hopefully sell some plastic discs, too.

I'll be there for you, as long as it works for me. I play a game, its called insincerity.

I'll name check Radiohead on this--they've done a pretty suave marketing plan on this new record. I think generally it's been a pretty cool thing, but what they've done is used those (sales) numbers in a way that they can spin them anyway they want cause you don't know what they are.

Bowie mattered to me. He reinvented himself so many times - it must have been a daring statement to do that, risking failure. And hanging out with him and seeing him like that - he's my dad's age, born in the same month - when you find someone who's been through a really dark period, which most of his music I care about is from, Low, Lodger, "Heroes" era.... But he came out of it and made something that mattered.

Try to find the right balance of keeping things exciting and treating your audience with respect, and also treating yourself as an artist with respect.

There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved.

I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, 'All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a-- if you want and it's $5 on your cable bill.'

I've got a canvas, I've got a scene, let’s fill that with sound.

God is DEAD, and no one cares! If there is a hell I'll see you there!

Lots of people can have girlfriends. But I can throw around guitars onstage! That'll be my epitaph: 'He never had a girlfriend, but you should've seen him smash a Les Paul!'

If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.

His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name.

When an instrument fails on stage it mocks you and must be destroyed!

When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie.

The result of a public that has a very high consumption rate and turnover rate is people listen to more music but spend less time with individual bits of music. It's made me more likely to put things up quickly and treat it more like a magazine instead of a novel.

I was at my most miserable when I had everything I ever wanted.

If I come up with rules or limitations it focuses me in a direction. And those rules can change if you realize it's a dumb idea. You start to mutate it to see what fits best.

I believe there's a God but I'm not too sure of his relevance.

Tired faith all worn and thin, for all we could have done, and all that could have been.