Top 100 Kim Gordon Quotes
#1. I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.
Kim Gordon
#2. I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
Kim Gordon
#3. Klamath was all about fishing and socializing and cooking and eating, and waking up the next day to start over again.
Kim Gordon
#4. I'll leave a store if I hate the music. If it's just, like, techno, I feel like my brain is going to explode.
Kim Gordon
#5. I am basically a shy person, so performing sometimes helps me focus - having all those people concentrate their attention on you. I don't see it so much as becoming another person onstage; it's more exploring a different side of your personality.
Kim Gordon
#6. I still don't really feel like a bass player.
Kim Gordon
#7. I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
Kim Gordon
#8. In rock music, people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened, and it really doesn't.
Kim Gordon
#9. What is a star? Is stardom a kind of suspended adulthood? Is it a place beyond good and evil? Is a star a person you need to believe in--a daredevil, a risk-taker, a person who goes close to the edge without falling?
Kim Gordon
#10. I tend to want to listen to melancholy music, but sometimes if you're feeling too sad, you can't.
Kim Gordon
#11. I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
Kim Gordon
#12. Well, it was kind of accidental that Jim started playing with us, although it wasn't sudden ... we hadn't really looked around to think who could be a fifth member.
Kim Gordon
#13. I'm a relatively shy person, but I love being challenged and putting myself in positions that are scary.
Kim Gordon
#14. 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.
Michael Stipe
#15. It's really hard for me to sing and play bass.
Kim Gordon
#16. The only really good performance is the one where you make yourself vulnerable, while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone.
Kim Gordon
#17. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it.
Kim Gordon
#18. The Westway, the old strip club on Clarkson Street, is still there, but today it's owned by a hipster restaurant entrepreneur who caters to the ironic cultural lifestylers, more fashion world than art, people who are "cool" because they live in New York.
Kim Gordon
#19. I love Northampton. As exciting and glamorous as New York can be, I'm always really relieved to get back there.
Kim Gordon
#20. Families are like little villages. You know where everything is, you know how everything works, your identity is fixed, and you can't really leave, or connect with anything or anybody outside, until your physically no longer there.
Kim Gordon
#21. I've done art on my own, and I've also collaborated with other people to make art. And collaborating with other people is always interesting because you end up doing things you probably wouldn't do otherwise.
Kim Gordon
#22. I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.
Kim Gordon
#23. No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive.
Kim Gordon
#24. I can't think about whether I'll disappoint Sonic Youth fans. It's not like I want people to be disappointed, but I just can't control that.
Kim Gordon
#25. I like being in a weak position, and making it strong.
Kim Gordon
#26. I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me.
Kim Gordon
#27. Working on art, as opposed to being in a constant collaborative state, as in a band, is something that I've always done - to a smaller degree, but it always remained a part of my integral self.
Kim Gordon
#29. I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know ... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
Kim Gordon
#30. I love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it's still very stylised.
Kim Gordon
#31. My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time, I was really puzzled by why people liked it.
Kim Gordon
#32. Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band's life. A few minutes later, both were done.
Kim Gordon
#33. I don't have any desire to do something that sounds explicitly rock. Like, I don't have a burning need to be a rock musician. I feel like I've taken that as far as I can take it, for me.
Kim Gordon
#34. [...] to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.
Kim Gordon
#35. I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else.
Kim Gordon
#36. Cockroaches were a problem, too, and to me the people who invented Combat, the little black roach-trapping contraption, are urban folk heroes.
Kim Gordon
#37. For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless.
Kim Gordon
#38. We'd have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants." "Okay, okay, well, that's life,
Kim Gordon
#39. I'm a slow learner. When people are so talented or facile at picking up an instrument and playing covers, like Yo La Tengo, I admire that. But I could never do that.
Kim Gordon
#40. I mean, I don't even think of myself as a musician, really.
Kim Gordon
#41. I've always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect.
Kim Gordon
#42. In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz.
Kim Gordon
#43. I like the adrenaline of playing improv - it makes me feel really calm.
Kim Gordon
#44. Joy Division was scheduled to play at Tier 3, but Ian Curtis killed himself a week before the gig.
Kim Gordon
#45. I see it as more of a teenage activity than, you know, she's only 11, but you know, I think it's great that she knows so many girls who want to play music. And I see it more as a teen activity than I do as going into music.
Kim Gordon
#46. Mulholland Drive has more filmic and real-life drama than any other road in L.A., as well as being the favored route of the Manson family for crosstown travel and creepy crawling exploits . . .
Kim Gordon
#47. I never thought about doing anything other than making art.
Kim Gordon
#48. Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?
Kim Gordon
#49. There's the added element of adrenaline if you're performing. You're aware of spatial relationships and the music.
Kim Gordon
#50. still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually - art based on some overriding idea - and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.
Kim Gordon
#51. I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.
Kim Gordon
#52. Everyone's so interior now, they're not really looking around them. They're on their phones.
Kim Gordon
#53. If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are.
Kim Gordon
#54. I give Iggy credit for deconstructing the very idea of entertainment.
Kim Gordon
#55. And then, I was thinking of doing a record just like starting with voice, because I did this one song that was just kind of a cappella, and I did it for this art piece I did where people could come and play music to go with a voice.
Kim Gordon
#56. It's hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.
Kim Gordon
#57. I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.
Kim Gordon
#58. Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise.
Kim Gordon
#59. Someone once wrote that in between the lives we lead and the lives we fantasize about living is the place in our heads where most of us actually live.
Kim Gordon
#60. I'm aware of how pop culture really infiltrates your expectations in a way that even if you think you're savvy about pop culture, it's so hard not to have these expectations of what a relationship should be. So I constantly feel like I have to bat those expectations down.
Kim Gordon
#61. There's only so many small shows you can do. A lot of the smaller things are more side project things. Not everything is appropriate for Sonic Youth to do.
Kim Gordon
#62. But everything has been so gradual that it's sort of all come from, just hard work and basically being at it.
Kim Gordon
#63. The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.
Kim Gordon
#64. but I couldn't decide if I was a courageous person in real life or whether I could only sing onstage. In that way I haven't changed much in thirty years at all.
Kim Gordon
#65. You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.
Kim Gordon
#66. . . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.
Kim Gordon
#67. Rap music is really good when you're traumatized.
Kim Gordon
#68. I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.
Kim Gordon
#69. People pay to see others believe in themselves.
Kim Gordon
#70. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson turns 'making the personal public' into a romantic, intellectual wet dream. A gorgeous book, inventive, fearless, and full of heart.
Kim Gordon
#71. Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.
Kim Gordon
#72. If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.
Kim Gordon
#73. L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.
Kim Gordon
#75. . . . for me the page, the gallery, the stage became the only places my emotions could be expressed and acted out comfortably.
Kim Gordon
#76. I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.
Kim Gordon
#77. One day I picked up the phone to hear a middle-aged female voice asking if there were "any green Salles" left; she wanted to match Salle's art to the color scheme of her living room furniture. It's all such a joke,
Kim Gordon
#78. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.
Kim Gordon
#79. I feel most free onstage. The audience, it's an abstraction. You don't really see anyone out there, but you feel the audience inside you.
Kim Gordon
#80. In "Shadow of a Doubt," I was trying to describe the connection you feel when your eyes meet another person's. You project all kinds of things on those eyes, feel them seeing into and past you, sometimes feel the sex behind them too.
Kim Gordon
#81. side. He began ranting about the fur coats they
Kim Gordon
#82. You're always going to feel like you're catching up, and part of that is just balancing work and motherhood and the whole feeling of needing to please, which I do think girls and women feel more than men.
Kim Gordon
#83. I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends.
Kim Gordon
#84. I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.
Kim Gordon
#85. I like that show 'Ray Donovan' - I'm obsessed with that. He's in Hollywood, he's some kind of a fixer, but he's also kind of a thug. And 'Scandal,' the D.C. one with Kerry Washington.
Kim Gordon
#86. I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
Kim Gordon
#87. I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
Kim Gordon
#88. Hold me tight, down on my knees, so I don't go burning 'cross the breeze.
Kim Gordon
#89. Because our daughters have school and it's just such a hassle going down to New York all the time, we can really only go on the weekends, we kind of ... Steve came up here and worked out stuff for the second half of the record.
Kim Gordon
#90. It's hard to say when the life of a band starts and stops ... but playing music together is an act of trust. When that's broken, it's impossible to continue.
Kim Gordon
#92. When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.
Kim Gordon
#93. I don't see myself as a rock star. I don't see myself in that way. I'm interested in work that offers some sort of critical dialogue.
Kim Gordon
#94. Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.
Kim Gordon
#95. I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play ... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.
Kim Gordon
#96. ...one of those mutual I-can-tell-you-are-a-super-sensitive-and-emotional-person-too sorts of connections.
Kim Gordon
#97. I'm a mom, but I don't always want to look just like that.
Kim Gordon
#98. It's amazing how many things you can do when you're just pretending.
Kim Gordon
#99. The love for a child is more an unconditional sort of love ... Although some parents are really narcissistic. In general, I think there is an expectation that love will be unconditional, but obviously it's not - even after living with someone for years.
Kim Gordon
#100. I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.
Kim Gordon
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top