Best 82 quotes of Michael Stipe on MyQuotes

AIDS had landed and I was terrified. I was very scared, just as everyone was in the '80s. It was really hard to be sexually active and to sleep with men and with women and not feel you had a responsibility in terms of having safe sex.

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

Anything you do as a group is fraught with compromise... But everyone 's got to do that, right? It's part of being a good parent, or a good boyfriend, whatever.

At the [teenage] time, I did have an inkling of my sexuality. And I had an inkling that I was different from other people in ways beyond my sexuality. But I didn't get into music because I thought, Oh, these people will understand me.

A wise man once said, 'The skill in attending a party is knowing when it's time to leave.'

Because the casual music listeners are the ones who turn on the radio and they don't really care what's playing, they just know that they kinda like it or it's easy to drive to or it's easy to sing along to or whatever.

Be yourself. Follow your heart. I know it sounds obvious, but it's the best advice at anyone ever. Take advice from other people, but take from it what feels right for you.

But I think the one thing that I can say about us is that we're very consistent about certain things and part of that is our desire to do the very best work that we can and not rest on our laurels, or not allow formula to come into what we do.

By nature I will find hope in everything. Even if it's the most incredibly hopeless situation or circumstance. That's just me... I'll never be able to see things any other way.

By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.

By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?

[Columbia House] magazines were how I found out about the punk world going on in New York. Because of what I read, at the age of 15, I hounded the local record store to order a copy of Horses [1975] for me by Patti Smith.

Everybody hurts sometimes Everybody cries

For every great thing we did, there is a very public moment of falling on our faces. But everything that came through us as a band was a distinct vision of R.E.M.

For me, as a music fan, visuals kind of steal away the purity of the song. My instinct is not to provide a visual to go with a piece of music. But here's MTV. It's really powerful.

Frankly I'm not great with heroin addicts. I tried heroin, but it was by accident. I'm not great with that level of substance abuse.

I am not an autobiographical writer. I'll take little elements here and there from things that I've actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example.

I came to New York for the first time with Peter Buck at age 19. We spent a week living out of a van on the street in front of a club in the West 60s called Hurrah. It's where Pylon played. I saw Klaus Nomi play there. And Michael Gira's band before he did Swans-they all wore cowboy boots and were so cool and had great hair. I was so jealous.

I distinctly remember a conversation with my band in the van where I was having a complete meltdown. It was 1984, I think, and I was huddled in the back corner of our van and saying, "I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this." I didn't want to play any more shows. I just wanted to stop.

If I'm tired of me, I'm sure the public is as well.

If you disagree with me, fine! Because that's the great thing about America, we can disagree!

I had to get a driver's license and drive to St. Louis to find the punk-rock scene that was happening there. And there was a punk-rock scene. It was sweet. It was real. It was like everywhere else in the county. It was a handful of people who were feeling the same pull, and, of course, it was like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer [1964]. Just the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the unbelievable eccentrics .

I knew [Kurt Cobain] and his daughter. And Courtney [Love] came and stayed at my house. R.E.M. worked on two records in Seattle and Peter Buck lived next door to Kurt and Courtney. So we all knew each other. I reached out to him with that project as an attempt to prevent what was going to happen.

I'm just not that fascinating a person to have had all those lives that I've written about.

I'm kind of quoting Thurston [Moore] and Kim [Gordon] in saying that about not being great with addicts, because they are the ones who said it to me.

I'm tired of being this solemn poet of the masses, the enigma shrouded in a mystery.

In fact, a lot of critics seemed to consider R.E.M. the first American music since the '60s to break out on its own and develop a stand-alone sound.

I really wanted to be on Six Feet Under as a corpse. That would be hysterical.

I remember traffic jams Motor boys and girls with tans Nearly was and almost rans I remember this, this ... At the edge of the continent

I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt [Cobain] out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn't come out and wouldn't answer the phone.

I started lip-synching with "Losing My Religion." There were a few horrendous mistakes we made, but I own those mistakes. I'm embarrassed by them. I always say when I look back at anything I've ever done, it's with equal dollops of humiliation and triumphant glory.

I stopped taking drugs [in 1983]. There were a lot of things that led up to it. One thing was that a lover died. An ex of mine died in a car wreck and I was really trashed when I found out about it and I couldn't cry. I woke up the next morning and I said, "That's it," so I quit then. It was horrible.

I think my apocalyptic feelings went deeper than [heavily influenced by Reagan and AIDS]. I'm really at peace with how afraid I am.

It was '86. We were a big enough name and we had enough cache that MTV wanted to play us, so, along with Michael Jackson and Madonna, they played our upside-down, black-and-white, backward, single unedited footage of a rock quarry with orange letters over the top of it and called it art.

I've always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing. In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.

I've never written a song that's hopeless. I'm not a hopeless person. I'm crazily optimistic. I crazily see the good in people. I crazily see the way out of a terrible situation. I crazily try to be the diplomat. If there are two warring factions in my life, I want them to agree to disagree at the very least.

I was a teenager, we were pretty much fully indoctrinated, thanks to sexual scare tactics. I remember so many public-health commercials with a B-actor in a fake alley background warning us to use protection or telling us the only real safe choice was abstinence. We were highly frightened of sex from day one. There was no free-swinging '90s.

I was born in Georgia. That's where my grandparents-and all my people-are from. But my family traveled a great deal because my dad was in the army as a helicopter pilot.

I was doing that [a collaboration with Kurt Cobain] to try to save his life. The collaboration was me calling up as an excuse to reach out to this guy. He was in a really bad place.

I was vegetarian, trying to eat from fast-food restaurants without meat. I didn't know how to eat properly and I was starving. I was adrenalized to the eyeballs from performing. I was afraid that I was sick with AIDS. We were playing five shows a week. I even went through a period of abstinence where I didn't drink and stopped having sex. Which is crazy. Maybe I'm answering too many questions at once here, but this is where my mind was at the age of 25.

I was vulnerable every day. Every night that I stepped on stage I was laying myself open.

I went through a period where I was really tired of seeing and reading about myself.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

Links have become the suburbs of the real world.

Love, love will be my strongest weapon

My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am.

My iPod that was programmed by Peter Buck. It has 7,000 songs hand-picked for me by him.

Once I reached my 40s, I thought to myself that if I'm going to play live now, I need to really mean this. I can't go out and be a little bit, for one moment slovenly in my choices as a performer. I mean, these people have paid a lot of money to be here, they've been through the nightmare of getting here, starving themselves waiting for us to get on stage, so I'm going to give them what they came here for.

On planes I always cry. Something about altitude, the lack of oxygen and the bad movies. I cried over a St. Bernard movie once on a plane. That was really embarrassing.

Our generation was supposed to be about trying to deal with nuclear concerns and environmental disasters.