Top 100 Brownstein's Quotes
#1. Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own.
Tama Janowitz
#2. At nineteen, you can make out for hours, that goal-less, amorphous melting into someone else.
Carrie Brownstein
#3. It's hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept.
Carrie Brownstein
#4. I've always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring.
Carrie Brownstein
#5. As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.
Carrie Brownstein
#6. You can't bury a part of yourself that's so innate to who you've been, even if it's not for the sake of anything other than a pure enjoyment of it.
Carrie Brownstein
#7. With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.
Carrie Brownstein
#8. I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.
Carrie Brownstein
#9. I'm kind of a hermit - it's almost easier for me to write about connection than to actually connect.
Carrie Brownstein
#10. I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
Carrie Brownstein
#11. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high. Stephen
Carrie Brownstein
#12. I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.
Carrie Brownstein
#13. I like how blogging emulates fandom because it's so completist and spontaneous. It really mirrors the way people listen to music, and I like that fluidity with online content.
Carrie Brownstein
#14. I am not bemoaning a diminishing awareness of references, but it's easier than ever to be divorced from both provenance an predecessors, to essentially be a cultural tease.
Carrie Brownstein
#15. I realized my yearning had little to do with place and more with the fact that I continually made a ritual of emptiness. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I would always feel a certain deficit. Like before, as a way to fill the hole, I began writing songs. Music began to restore me again.
Carrie Brownstein
#16. There are foods you should avoid. For me, sugar is a no. Because it gives me a spike and then a crash.
Carrie Brownstein
#17. With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I'm able to go with 'Portlandia' has a wider range, but also a brighter range.
Carrie Brownstein
#18. I'm pretty horrible at relationships and haven't been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on - returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy - is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.
Carrie Brownstein
#19. I got kind of tired of playing, I think. But I think it will be part of my life again, maybe.
Carrie Brownstein
#20. I think you should be prepared for a green-screen CGI at all times.
Carrie Brownstein
#21. But there are also much less dire reasons to have a manager, reasons that may have been useful to us but that we willfully ignored, or were just too stubborn or parsimonious to try.
Carrie Brownstein
#22. For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.
Carrie Brownstein
#23. Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It's cliche to write that, but it's true.
Carrie Brownstein
#24. I suppose we were better observers than communicators; we were all subjects to be worried over, complained about, even adored, but never quite people to be held or loved. There was an intellectual, almost absurd distance.
Carrie Brownstein
#25. I think proteins are really good for your brain. And your brain is where comedy comes from.
Carrie Brownstein
#26. Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.
Carrie Brownstein
#27. I think hypochondria always plays a part in the healthcare landscape.
Carrie Brownstein
#28. I think grief is a step towards strength because it allows you to be porous and take everything in, and have it transform you. What will sit within you is despairing, but at least it's feeling. You're not numb. Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.
Carrie Brownstein
#29. I've learned to really enjoy video games. It's really toxic to have in your house, because it's really distracting.
Carrie Brownstein
#30. I'm really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It's unadorned. It's not very pretty.
Carrie Brownstein
#31. To me, ugliness, grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.
Carrie Brownstein
#32. From a self-conscious standpoint, it's hard to see myself on a screen in a way that isn't just me playing music or doing something silly.
Carrie Brownstein
#33. The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that's where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence.
Carrie Brownstein
#34. The hedonistic lifestyle is difficult to achieve when you're still carrying your own gear. Trust me that you don't feel glamorous with a 60-pound amp in your arms; it's a lot less sexy than toting a vodka gimlet and impossible to do in heels.
Carrie Brownstein
#35. I think that there's always an assumption, when a band goes on hiatus or stops playing, that there's some acrimony brewing under the surface.
Carrie Brownstein
#36. With access to everything, we can dabble without really knowing. I am not bemoaning a diminishing awareness of references, but it's easier than ever to be divorced from both provenance and predecessors, to essentially be a cultural tease. The
Carrie Brownstein
#37. I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and usinspiring.
Carrie Brownstein
#38. Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.
Carrie Brownstein
#39. There are times that a work exists for the sake of getting you to the next step, as a testing ground for ideas, for recognizing parts if your process that were theretofore unnoticed or undiscovered.
Carrie Brownstein
#40. I'm always trying to encourage people not to limit themselves in the same way that many of our parents stayed with one job forever.
Carrie Brownstein
#42. You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.
Carrie Brownstein
#43. I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.
Carrie Brownstein
#44. Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like; band configurations were abnormal, either multi-limbed or conspicuously amputated.
Carrie Brownstein
#45. The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore-no matter what the impetus is for them getting there-the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or stationery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me,
Carrie Brownstein
#46. We felt there was a creeping tepidness in music, a cloying softness, as if music were only a salve, not an instigator. It's
Carrie Brownstein
#47. Yet I felt it was unfair to be labeled when I had yet to find a label for myself, and when binary, fixed identities held no meaning or safety for me.
Carrie Brownstein
#48. To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness. Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degress of experience - to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.
Carrie Brownstein
#49. I'm all about being prudent. And I've started to appreciate experiences more than actual objects.
Carrie Brownstein
#50. Once you're away from music, I realize that's as intrinsic to who I am as anything else. That's the part that takes me out of my brain.
Carrie Brownstein
#51. I've realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.
Carrie Brownstein
#52. People are wearing fleece, which is a hard fabric to be angry in.
Carrie Brownstein
#53. I like to connect with people through my work. That's my favorite way - meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out.
Carrie Brownstein
#54. No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live.
Carrie Brownstein
#56. I like to take things incrementally, and strive for something that feels more attainable.
Carrie Brownstein
#57. They were like really loud librarians. And as the audience, you better shut the hell up because you're in the library of rock right now. When
Carrie Brownstein
#58. I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.
Carrie Brownstein
#59. I've mostly been focusing on writing, and I've really enjoyed not playing music. It will always be part of my life, but I don't feel the immediate need to be playing for people.
Carrie Brownstein
#60. There is a direness in the construction of safety, in the telling of theretofore untold stories.
Carrie Brownstein
#61. These new bands sound like Gang of Four - if Gang of Four sucked.
Carrie Brownstein
#62. My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.
Carrie Brownstein
#63. The internet is just a scary place. It's better to just go to the doctor. Don't let Google get inside your head. It will do bad things to you.
Carrie Brownstein
#64. I never wanted to feel ashamed for striving, for desiring, for ambition. And I never wanted to judge another woman, or anyone, for that matter, for their own aspirations, even if they differed from my own
Carrie Brownstein
#65. I think short-term goals are important. Trying to set a missive for yourself for the entire year can be daunting, and it can feel too easy to fail or fall short of that.
Carrie Brownstein
#66. I would not call myself an optimist, even though I would aspire to be. I am innately a skeptic. There's kind of an incessant dissatisfaction that I have, that I'm always trying to either expose or fight against or wrestle with.
Carrie Brownstein
#67. Finding a partner who understands the vicissitudes of travel is challenging. A nomadic life fosters inconsistencies and contradictions within you - a vacillation between loneliness and needing desperately to be left alone.
Carrie Brownstein
#68. It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss.
Carrie Brownstein
#69. For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.
Carrie Brownstein
#70. A lot of music for me was about - I mean aside from the fun and challenge of writing and being really good friends with my bandmates - getting to perform.
Carrie Brownstein
#71. The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.
Carrie Brownstein
#73. I think in some ways, whether you've ever actually been to Portland, people definitely understand this highly curated niche lifestyle, because a lot of people are sort of striving for that now. Or they're hating on it.
Carrie Brownstein
#74. Anything that isn't traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly. I
Carrie Brownstein
#75. With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.
Carrie Brownstein
#76. Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so Wild Flag was not a sure thing, it was a 'maybe,' a 'possibility.' But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts.
Carrie Brownstein
#77. To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that's where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery.
Carrie Brownstein
#78. I don't think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good.
Carrie Brownstein
#79. Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I'm not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.
Carrie Brownstein
#80. With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.
Carrie Brownstein
#81. Practice. Learn and then unlearn - that's the trick in finding your own style of playing. You can't merely emulate, you have to innovate, or at the very least create your own path into the process.
Carrie Brownstein
#82. After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.
Carrie Brownstein
#83. I think one of the reasons I haven't been doing music is because I think that some of my performance, like, needs are being taken care of in other mediums.
Carrie Brownstein
#84. It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.
Carrie Brownstein
#85. We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted.
Carrie Brownstein
#86. Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.
Carrie Brownstein
#87. It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.
Carrie Brownstein
#89. For me, being in shape means, like, not having cynicism out-weigh optimism on a daily basis.
Carrie Brownstein
#90. I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.
Carrie Brownstein
#91. I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.
Carrie Brownstein
#94. It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.
Carrie Brownstein
#95. I felt that first awareness that there's a whole set of species whose sounds and calls you've never heard - the wonder of realizing that people are growing up with an entirely different sensory experience from yours. This whole country seemed so shiny to me.
Carrie Brownstein
#96. I have no problem spending money on a great meal with friends or a flight to see somebody that I love, versus something like a fancy car. I don't need a fancy car. I don't need a giant TV.
Carrie Brownstein
#97. I would love to do a reunion tour if it only involved basements across the U.S.
Carrie Brownstein
#98. "We can't name it, but we can sing along." That is my ultimate relationship to any art form, but especially music.
Carrie Brownstein
#99. I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.
Carrie Brownstein
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