Top 100 Reznor Quotes
#1. If Trent Reznor calls and says he needs a drummer for his tour ... I'm there.
Tommy Lee
#2. I had a great conversation with Trent Reznor. Trent said, "I'd have a sixpack, too, if I didn't write my own music!"
Ian Astbury
#3. Put some muscle into it! Channel your inner Trent Reznor!
Robin Benway
#4. With Nine Inch Nails, it's all Trent Reznor. So when we get a new record from Nine Inch Nails, it depends on what side of the bed Trent's waking up on and what he's been eating lately and what he's been into. Because he's preparing the whole meal.
Zakk Wylde
#5. I've attended many concerts where I felt let down and I was wishing it would be something else. Not that it's their duty to please me, but at the same time, I think a lot about what it's like through the eyes of the consumer, the fan. I want not to pander to the audience, but to be aware of them.
Trent Reznor
#6. 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
#7. One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract. I said, 'Wait - you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it?'
Trent Reznor
#8. In my life, I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far, and who says you have to stop there, and what's behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while, you get too far down in the quicksand.
Trent Reznor
#9. I don't have to save rock. I don't even like rock that much.
Trent Reznor
#10. In Nine Inch Nails, I've been the guy calling the shots since inception. I'd gotten used to that.
Trent Reznor
#11. In my nothing, you were everything, to me.
Trent Reznor
#12. 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.
Trent Reznor
#13. The Grammys make me hate music, and certainly everyone in the ass-licking music industry.
Trent Reznor
#14. Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.
Trent Reznor
#15. 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.
Trent Reznor
#16. 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.'
Trent Reznor
#17. Perfect little dream, The kind that hurts the most.
Trent Reznor
#18. 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.
Trent Reznor
#19. I've become impossible, holding on to when everything seemed to matter more.
Trent Reznor
#20. 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.
Trent Reznor
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I think the whole aspect of social networking is vulgar and repulsive in a lot of ways. But I also see why it's appealing - I've had that little high you get from posting stuff online. But then you think, 'Did I need to say that?' I've explored that enough to know to stay kind of quiet these days.
Trent Reznor
#24. The dynamic of a relationship changes when one person gets sober.
Trent Reznor
#25. Why don't the Grammys matter? Because it feels rigged and cheap - like a popularity contest that the insiders club has decided.
Trent Reznor
#26. 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
#27. I write most of my songs when I'm in a bad mood.
Trent Reznor
#28. My music, I hope, takes 100% of your concentration. I know how to do that.
Trent Reznor
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It's a humbling thing, having kids. One of my sons came to rehearsals, and now he says Daddy's job is 'go play loud music.'
Trent Reznor
#32. I'm a lot less precious than I used to be about putting things out, for better or for worse. 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.
Trent Reznor
#33. 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.
Trent Reznor
#34. 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.'
Trent Reznor
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I think my music's more disturbing than Tupac's - or at least I thought some of the themes of 'The Downward Spiral' were more disturbing on a deeper level - you know, issues about suicide and hating yourself and God and people and everything else.
Trent Reznor
#39. 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
#40. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me.
Trent Reznor
#41. I didn't want to be in a Pepsi commercial with R2-D2 sitting on my shoulder.
Trent Reznor
#42. 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
#43. '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
#44. 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
#45. When an instrument fails on stage it mocks you and must be destroyed!
Trent Reznor
#46. I think early on in my career, I was heavily inspired by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept, and films of David Lynch, for example, where the soundscape plays a very important role in the listening experience.
Trent Reznor
#47. Just how deep do you believe? Can you get up off your knees?
Trent Reznor
#48. 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
#49. I've always been into computers. When I was getting out of high school and forming my identity musically, all of it was really coming into the fold, computers and drum machines. It felt like, you know, I'm in the right place at the right time. I liked the collision.
Trent Reznor
#50. Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.
Trent Reznor
#51. 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
#52. I think the thing I've always tried to do is - and I didn't plan it, it just started to come out that way - is try to make challenging music that flirts with accessibility.
Trent Reznor
#53. I think it's easy to make impenetrable music that nobody can get, and you can hide behind that sometimes.
Trent Reznor
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. As long as it feels valid to me and feels sincere, I'll do what I do under the moniker of Nine Inch Nails if it's appropriate. I would hate to think I would ever be in a position where I'm faking it to get a paycheck.
Trent Reznor
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Though I still have no semblance of a life outside of Nine Inch Nails at the moment, I realize my goals have gone from getting a record deal or selling another record to being a better person, more well-rounded, having friends, having a relationship with somebody.
Trent Reznor
#60. I think, fundamentally, music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards.
Trent Reznor
#61. 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
#62. I foolishly thought that if I just 'made it' then everything would be okay. And everything wasn't okay.
Trent Reznor
#63. 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
#64. 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.
Trent Reznor
#65. Being human is a lot more difficult than being on tour.
Trent Reznor
#66. 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.
Trent Reznor
#67. 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
#68. His perfect kingdom of killing, suffering and pain Demands devotion, atrocities done in his name.
Trent Reznor
#69. I'm very much aware of the dangers of becoming a cliche. Mr. Anger, someone who gets meaner, angrier on record.
Trent Reznor
#71. 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
#72. My doctor says, 'You've got one of the hardest ones to treat because it's not bipolar, it's not up and down, you're always just about a quart low in the mood department,
Trent Reznor
#74. Frankly, I have always dreaded writing - there always seemed to be pain involved, unpleasant self-examination and a lot of fear.
Trent Reznor
#75. 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
#76. The reality is that people think it's okay to steal music.
Trent Reznor
#77. 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
#78. It's not like I ride a broom into interviews. I don't hang upside down with a cape on.
Trent Reznor
#79. 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
#80. If you can use a search engine, you can find any piece of music that's been recorded for free. I'm not saying that's right, but it's a fact, and I'm surprised that more people don't accept or acknowledge that and try to adapt in some way.
Trent Reznor
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I miss how a record label can help spread the word that you have something out.
Trent Reznor
#88. When I first played 'Wolfenstein 3D,' it blew my mind. It had a big impact on me.
Trent Reznor
#89. This isn't meant to last. This is for right now.
Trent Reznor
#90. I've watched with a kind of wary eye how gaming has progressed. I was there at the beginning with Pong in the arcade, and a lot of my great childhood memories were around a 'Tempest' machine.
Trent Reznor
#91. I really try to put myself in uncomfortable situations. Complacency is my enemy.
Trent Reznor
#92. I love David Fincher and I think he's a genius.
Trent Reznor
#93. God is DEAD, and no one cares! If there is a hell I'll see you there!
Trent Reznor
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. MTV can't do less for me, let's put it that way. I'm fine without them.
Trent Reznor
#97. I like the idea of working in an album-sized chunk, you know, and I never looked at Nine Inch Nails as a project that would be a hit-driven, single-based kind of thing.
Trent Reznor
#98. I was never a Lime Wire guy because it's too much hassle to find the song.
Trent Reznor
#99. 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.
Trent Reznor
#100. I feel uncomfortable because I'm insecure about who I am.
Trent Reznor
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
