Top 100 Trent Reznor Quotes
#1. 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.
Trent Reznor
#2. I don't have to save rock. I don't even like rock that much.
Trent Reznor
#3. In Nine Inch Nails, I've been the guy calling the shots since inception. I'd gotten used to that.
Trent Reznor
#5. Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.
Trent Reznor
#6. Perfect little dream, The kind that hurts the most.
Trent Reznor
#7. I've become impossible, holding on to when everything seemed to matter more.
Trent Reznor
#8. 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.
Trent Reznor
#9. I had to come to terms about becoming an addict, which, for a long time, I lied to myself about the status of until I couldn't lie any more, 'cause I was either going to die or get better.
Trent Reznor
#10. The dynamic of a relationship changes when one person gets sober.
Trent Reznor
#11. With a Nine Inch Nails show, I'm building on a legacy that comes with a certain set of expectations. I have to push that forward, I have to reinvent myself, I have to feel current and valid.
Trent Reznor
#12. 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.
Trent Reznor
#13. 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.
Trent Reznor
#14. I don't even know why I'm saying this in an interview situation, but I always feel like I'm not good enough for some reason. I wish that wasn't the case, but left to my own devices, that voice starts speaking up.
Trent Reznor
#15. 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.
Trent Reznor
#16. 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.
Trent Reznor
#17. 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.
Trent Reznor
#18. I doubt I'll ever pay someone to do a remix again, because there's some amazing stuff just coming out of bedrooms.
Trent Reznor
#19. 'Downward Spiral' felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.
Trent Reznor
#20. What is exciting is taking back the excitement of being able to debut something to an audience in exactly the way you want to.
Trent Reznor
#21. When I was growing up, the people who liked the Beatles, I didn't like, so I didn't pay attention to them.
Trent Reznor
#22. Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.
Trent Reznor
#23. When I sit down to make a set list I usually think, 'We'll build it up here, take it down here, go into a quiet section here, explode here,' in a way that there's a flow and it doesn't feel like shuffle on an iPod.
Trent Reznor
#24. I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes.
Trent Reznor
#25. People are always saying, 'You're really nice, I thought you were going to be a complete asshole.' I'm getting pretty fed up with it. I just want to say to them, 'Well I could always piss on your head.'
Trent Reznor
#26. 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.
Trent Reznor
#27. The music I always liked as a kid was stuff I could bum out to and realize, 'Hey, someone else feels that way, too.' So if someone can do that with my music, it's mission accomplished.
Trent Reznor
#28. 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.
Trent Reznor
#29. 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.
Trent Reznor
#30. I foolishly thought that if I just 'made it' then everything would be okay. And everything wasn't okay.
Trent Reznor
#31. I hated school ... I freaking hated it. The fact is that it revolved around something you didn't have access to. If you weren't on the football team, if you were in the band, you were a leper. When people say those were the best years of our lives, I want to scream.
Trent Reznor
#32. Being human is a lot more difficult than being on tour.
Trent Reznor
#33. I did not grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio.
Trent Reznor
#34. His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name.
Trent Reznor
#35. I'm very much aware of the dangers of becoming a cliche. Mr. Anger, someone who gets meaner, angrier on record.
Trent Reznor
#36. 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.
Trent Reznor
#37. When I return to the writing process after being away from it for a while, the first part of it always is being honest with myself: What am I into right now? Is it rock bands and guitars, is it noise, is it dance beats and electronics? Is it space, is it clutter?
Trent Reznor
#38. The reality is that people think it's okay to steal music.
Trent Reznor
#39. 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.
Trent Reznor
#40. It's not like I ride a broom into interviews. I don't hang upside down with a cape on.
Trent Reznor
#41. Any time I sit down and write music, the first part of that is always centering myself and thinking about who I currently am.
Trent Reznor
#42. I was excited by the process of Pandora, which I still think is a decent product. Not as great in actuality as it sounds. After the first hour, its weaknesses start to show up.
Trent Reznor
#43. 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.
Trent Reznor
#44. I thought my goal in life was to be in a successful band, and I had got that, but I was as miserable as I had ever been, and I couldn't understand why that would be.
Trent Reznor
#45. 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.
Trent Reznor
#46. The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.
Trent Reznor
#47. 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!'
Trent Reznor
#48. I miss how a record label can help spread the word that you have something out.
Trent Reznor
#49. This isn't meant to last. This is for right now.
Trent Reznor
#50. 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?'
Trent Reznor
#51. 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.
Trent Reznor
#52. MTV can't do less for me, let's put it that way. I'm fine without them.
Trent Reznor
#53. I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.
Trent Reznor
#54. 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.
Trent Reznor
#55. When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes.
Trent Reznor
#56. 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.
Trent Reznor
#57. It won't give up, it wants me dead
Goddamn this noise inside my head
Trent Reznor
#58. Bow down before the one you serve, you're going to get what you deserve.
Trent Reznor
#59. When your culture comes from watching TV every day, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you.
Trent Reznor
#61. 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.
Trent Reznor
#62. It probably wasn't until Nine Inch Nails played the first Lollapalooza that I actually went to a festival.
Trent Reznor
#63. I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.
Trent Reznor
#65. If I go onstage, I want to give people everything they want and more. I'll wash their car for them on their way out.
Trent Reznor
#66. There's always been an element of 'right time, right place' to Nine Inch Nails. When we stepped onstage at Woodstock '94, I could sense it. I get goosebumps thinking about it now. Like, 'I don't know how we did this, but somehow we've touched a nerve.'
Trent Reznor
#67. Self-examination with a close-up mirror in an antiseptic environment is what Nine Inch Nails is based on.
Trent Reznor
#68. 'Yeezus,' I really love it. I think the sound of it is cool.
Trent Reznor
#69. 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.
Trent Reznor
#70. I like the idea of subversively communicating with people ... so that you make people see things in different ways.
Trent Reznor
#71. I believe sometimes you have a choice in what inspiration you choose to follow and other times you really don't.
Trent Reznor
#72. If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.
Trent Reznor
#73. I would love to be looked at some day - and I'm not ever saying I'm at this level - but I'd love to be mentioned in the same breath as a Bowie or an Eno. Those are the people that I admire artistically, their career trajectory, the integrity throughout their career, the bravery of their career.
Trent Reznor
#74. When fame presented itself to me, I was not at a point in my life where I was equipped to deal with it.
Trent Reznor
#75. I'll be honest, watching the music industry collapse has been demoralizing and disheartening at times.
Trent Reznor
#76. You can punch a wall or write a song. Just as painful either way, but you have something to show for it at the end of the day with a song.
Trent Reznor
#77. I found that when I was putting my own music out, with my Twitter feed as the pure marketing budget, I'm preaching to the choir.
Trent Reznor
#78. Sometimes I think I spend my whole life trying to figure out where I fit in.
Trent Reznor
#79. If you have something to say, then say it. Express yourself and break the rules.
Trent Reznor
#80. 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?
Trent Reznor
#81. 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.
Trent Reznor
#82. 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.
Trent Reznor
#83. The least responsive audience I can ever remember playing to.
Trent Reznor
#84. 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.
Trent Reznor
#85. I thought I'd reached the bottom a few times, but then I'd realise there was another 30 floors of despair below that.
Trent Reznor
#86. 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.
Trent Reznor
#87. When Twitter made its way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and 'human.'
Trent Reznor
#88. My life has two modes. One is sitting around writing and contemplating or building things. The other is execution mode. It takes a while to switch from one to the other.
Trent Reznor
#89. I used to buy vinyl. 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.
Trent Reznor
#90. I believe there's a God but I'm not too sure of his relevance.
Trent Reznor
#91. I don't have a family. I'd like to have one. I just haven't somehow gotten around to it yet.
Trent Reznor
#92. 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.
Trent Reznor
#93. 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.
Trent Reznor
#94. I aspire to make a record that sounds better 10 listens in than it does after two, and still, at 50 listens, you're picking out things that add a depth and a thoughtfulness to it; there's enough in there that you can still be extracting pieces out of it.
Trent Reznor
#95. 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.
Trent Reznor
#96. And when the day arrives I'll become the sky and I'll become the sea and the sea will come to kiss me for I am going home. Nothing can stop me now.
Trent Reznor
#97. The fact that someone can relate to something you, in an intimate moment, jotted down, just blew me away.
Trent Reznor
#98. Making noise is easy; making stuff people understand is an easy thing to do.
Trent Reznor
#99. I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything.
Trent Reznor
#100. I'd never want to be Gene Simmons, an old man who puts on makeup to entertain kids, like a clown going to work.
Trent Reznor
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