Top 100 Wainwright Quotes
#1. Trust me, Wainwright, ninety-nine times out of a hundred you can bet the bank that I'm serious."
"What about the one time when you're not?"
"I'm asleep.
Jayne Ann Krentz
#2. You know, people always ask me how I describe my music. First of all I tell them that's their job and then that also one day I hope to have things referred to as Martha Wainwright -esque.
Martha Wainwright
#3. I really want to work with Rufus Wainwright. Michael Stipe from R.E.M. I would love to work with Kanye West.
Rico Love
#4. I would love to play with Rufus Wainwright. He's one of my favorite songwriters.
Sydney Wayser
#5. He was also glad that Wainwright was late, for that would give him a slight moral advantage when the interview opened. Such trivialities played a greater part in human affairs than anyone who set much store on logic and reason might wish.
Anonymous
#7. Wainwright's Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.
Douglas Adams
#8. Where did you learn to do that?"
"Los Angeles High School of Performing Arts," I said. "They taught me how to open my throat to sing. Then Kevin Wainwright taught me how to put his dick down it."
He laughed. "I'd like to thank LA Unified and Kevin Whatever for this moment.
C.D. Reiss
#9. Rufus Wainwright is my go-to for any kind of emotion. He's got songs for all of it.
Drake Bell
#10. I like Rufus Wainwright a whole lot. He makes me wanna be even more musical.
Edie Brickell
#11. The worst mistake I ever made has become the best thing I ever did.
- Darius Wainwright
Jayne Fresina
#12. I'm not a terrible smoker, actually. My major addiction, which is horrible, is straight boys.
Rufus Wainwright
#13. I was in the forest jumping around daffodils while everyone was high on heroin.
Rufus Wainwright
#14. I really do fear that I'm dying I really do fear that I'm dead I saw it in your eyes what I'm looking for I saw it in your eyes what will make me live.
Rufus Wainwright
#18. If I had had more of a strategic attitude towards how to reveal my sexuality, and if I'd even played with it a little more, I could have sold a lot more albums and been a lot more famous.
Rufus Wainwright
#19. I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.
Loudon Wainwright III
#20. Every video I do is over budget by the time I walk on set. I am massively extravagant in my personal habits.
Rufus Wainwright
#21. Climate change has always been sort of my main focus. I think also with [what happened in Fukushima, Japan] there's still a lot to think about in terms of what's coming down the pike into the world's oceans, too.
Rufus Wainwright
#22. I was a smoker for years. Occasionally I slip and have a cigarette. Remarkably, my voice has held up. I'm grateful, obviously. But I don't gargle with honey and ground-up bird eggs. I have no secrets.
Loudon Wainwright III
#23. An objective is an ambition, and life without ambition is ... well, aimless wandering.
Alfred Wainwright
#24. Everything I do, I feel is genius. Whether it is or it isn't.
Rufus Wainwright
#25. I bemoan the fact that all my famous friends have places in St. Bart's and I have to go to Montauk.
Rufus Wainwright
#27. I think the minute you mention death, people run for the hills - unless it's heavy metal. People do not like death.
Rufus Wainwright
#28. I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.
Loudon Wainwright III
#29. Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it's blue, and there's palm trees; it's a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.
Loudon Wainwright III
#30. I don't think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.
Loudon Wainwright III
#31. Certainly in terms of my life - anybody's life - you go through death, childbirth and marriage, glory and defeat, and so on.
Rufus Wainwright
#32. If I had five minutes to live, I don't think I'd be bothered singing a song. I'd be dead, so it won't really matter. I'd have a glass of wine and a cigarette.
Loudon Wainwright III
#33. My love of maple syrup. I've been known to knock back a can over a couple days: A swig here, a swig there, and next thing you know it's gone. It's a habit I have to stave off. I don't want to lose all my teeth.
Rufus Wainwright
#34. That will to love is very powerful. But it doesn't always win.
Rufus Wainwright
#36. I play in bars all the time in the States, so I'm kind of used to it. I've just got off the road with the family in Australia, and I enjoyed it but it feels really good to be getting back to doing this stuff.
Martha Wainwright
#37. I was not that pretty a girl and I was never pursued as a teenager or young woman, so I was used to having no shame and trying to get people to love me.
Martha Wainwright
#38. I knew I was gay when I was around 13. There wasn't the internet, there weren't support groups, AIDS was everywhere. I mean, it was really dark.
Rufus Wainwright
#39. I want to carve out a serious period of time to focus on the next opera without any distractions. And to do that you need money.
Rufus Wainwright
#40. I have managed to eke out a good and substantial existence. I'm not shoveling gold bricks or anything, but I do very, very well.
Rufus Wainwright
#41. One of the main destructive forces within our family has been these runaway egos. I think if you look at any show business family, that struggle exists.
Rufus Wainwright
#42. I still believe that love is the most powerful force in the world, even though I am yet to experience it fully.
Rufus Wainwright
#43. When it came to using elements of your personal life in your work, my mother was the master, or the mistress. There were three or four songs she wrote about my father - songs about failed love.
Rufus Wainwright
#44. I'm in hotel rooms night after night, playing a lot of the same venues as my dad and carrying the guitar that used to be his. We're the same person. I don't know if he realises how much of a legacy he has left to his children.
Martha Wainwright
#46. It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel.
Loudon Wainwright III
#47. I may not lead the most dramatic life, but in my brain it's 'War and Peace' everyday.
Rufus Wainwright
#48. I'd like to think that on a lot of teams, I'd be a No. 1. The thing I do know is that every time I take the mound, in my mind I'm the best pitcher in the league.
Adam Wainwright
#49. I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.
Rufus Wainwright
#50. It's hard to be a No. 1 when you're not even No. 1 on your team.
Adam Wainwright
#51. Cigarettes and chocolate milk These are just a couple of my cravings Everything it seems I like's a little bit stronger A little bit thicker A little bit harmful for me.
Rufus Wainwright
#52. I'm very much a romantic. I'm highly attuned to an older sensibility, which I believe is alive and well. We're not that far ahead of the Romantic Age in society.
Rufus Wainwright
#53. I have earned hundreds of thousands of pounds, but I can't seem to get to grips with money.
Rufus Wainwright
#54. I tried to find a way out in many ways, but it all caught up with me. Once I realised I could sing and write songs, it was just so much easier to do than anything else!
Martha Wainwright
#55. I thought there was a chance right from the beginning.
Adam Wainwright
#56. Geoff Muldaur was and is one of my musical heroes. When I listen to him sing and play, I can hear the coal mine, the cotton field, and last, but certainly foremost, the boy's boarding school.
Loudon Wainwright III
#57. Looking back, one of the things I love most about my mom was that she never, ever relented. She stuck to her guns right up until the end. She wasn't abusive, but she was never that thrilled that I was gay.
Rufus Wainwright
#58. Guess the world needs both sun And the moon too Sad with what I have except for you.
Rufus Wainwright
#59. You were made to soar, to crash to earth, then to rise and soar again.
Alfred Wainwright
#60. I was kind of a misfit, and when my mother died, I had to become an adult, something that I never thought I would ever be.
Martha Wainwright
#61. Wouldn't Ponochio II be a great musical, now that he has to face the real world and get a wife ... job. Now he wants to be a toy again.
Rufus Wainwright
#62. The artist who gave me the most inspiration and direction, especially as a singer - and I absolutely consider myself a singer, 100 percent - is Nina Simone. She's my ultimate pianist-singer-type person.
Rufus Wainwright
#63. Some people go to Berlin to get more cutting edge; I went and started wearing lederhosen and going to visit baroque palaces.
Rufus Wainwright
#64. Once illness strikes, you realize there's not a lot of time for you to do what you really need to do. And there's no time like the present.
Rufus Wainwright
#65. I have a lot of advantages: I'm not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn't abused as a child, so I'm doing okay!
Rufus Wainwright
#66. For better or worse, I've always been curious musically. Whether it's opera or Judy Garland or pop, I've deliberately sought those things out. I've never wanted to do the same things over and over. Some think I've accomplished what I set out to do, and others consider me a dilettante.
Rufus Wainwright
#67. When I was signed, at the age of 23 ... the fact that I presented myself as an out gay man was very, very unusual.
Rufus Wainwright
#68. I wasn't in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.
Loudon Wainwright III
#69. And you will believe in love And all that it's supposed to be But just until the fish start to smell And you're struck down by a hammer.
Rufus Wainwright
#70. I'm not born again, I'm not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be okay. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings.
Rufus Wainwright
#71. I wanted to be heard myself, which is hard in a household of people who were very showy. It forced me to find myself and define a personality and a way of being different, and that's a thing that's going to help me to survive in a world of many people playing the guitar.
Martha Wainwright
#72. You had to be an over-the-top, demanding, dramatic figure in order to progress as a woman in Europe over the last few hundred years. Now people say, "You're being such a prima donna," meaning you're being hard to deal with or crazy. It's a bit sexist.
Rufus Wainwright
#73. As it turns out, three of my four kids are professional singers. And they're really interesting, good singers.
Loudon Wainwright III
#74. I've always gravitated towards opera, and the Royal Opera House is quite possibly the greatest opera house on earth.
Rufus Wainwright
#75. I would love to have a number one hit. The truth is if I don't get one, I'll be fine, but at the same time, the truth is that I'm dying for one, as well.
Rufus Wainwright
#76. I wish I could just relax sometimes and make some money, but I always feel like I have to prove some kind of big, profound point.
Rufus Wainwright
#77. When you make a record, you listen to it literally hundreds of times. When it's done and you can't do anything else, I never listen to my records.
Loudon Wainwright III
#78. My music comes from country music. Merle Haggard is God, and I do believe that. I'm not too tuned in to country music. I don't know who Brooks and Dunn are. I like Shania Twain, though!
Loudon Wainwright III
#79. My mother had a lot of parties when I was a child. There'd always be a moment when she would place me on the upright piano and have me sing Somewhere 'Over the Rainbow'.
Rufus Wainwright
#80. I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.
Rufus Wainwright
#83. 'Prima Donna' is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience.
Rufus Wainwright
#84. I hated the idea that I would be like my father. Which is one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to be a writer and wanted to be an actor instead. I wanted to go in a total different direction. But, of course, I ended up being a writer anyway.
Loudon Wainwright III
#85. I have travelled and been pretty much a one man operation for most of my career, and I think it'll continue to be that way.
Loudon Wainwright III
#88. It seems like the older I get, the more unreal the world becomes.
Rufus Wainwright
#89. I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!
Loudon Wainwright III
#91. I'd be hanging out in my bathrobe all day, stinky, just writing, and my mom allowed me to do this-as long as I was writing songs. She said, 'As long as you're seriously working on music, I'll support you. Don't get a job, because if you work, it will crush you.
Rufus Wainwright
#92. In retrospect, I'm really shocked at how far I put my heart out there on the line with 'Prima Donna'. I seem to have this knack for being able to accomplish that.
Rufus Wainwright
#93. I've been thinking of trying my hand at rap. I've been recording snippets on my BlackBerry.
Rufus Wainwright
#94. Well, my great lesson with that was I went to the same production twice - once completely high and once completely sober - and both times were equally wonderful.
Rufus Wainwright
#95. Premiering a new opera is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, and opening nights of any opera are always pretty stressful.
Rufus Wainwright
#96. Displaying a bland, even an eerie, disregard for what appeared to be the facts of the situation, he fell back on an old habit of looking ahead to the next defeat.
Loudon Wainwright III
#97. I've learnt to hide my tears on stage. They make people uncomfortable.
Martha Wainwright
#98. But I don't even think you hear me at all Under your medieval ceiling behind your biblical wall
Rufus Wainwright
#99. I don't know if it will be my big comeback, but I think it is a statement - that I am a self-sustaining, vibrant, long-term artist, and I'm not going away! And if you don't give me credit, then the musical gods will!
Rufus Wainwright
#100. The mind has so many pictures Why can't I sleep with my eyes open? The mind has so many memories Can you remember what it looks like when I cry? I'm trying, trying to tell you All that I can in a sweet and velvet tongue But no words ever could sell you Sell you on me after all that I have done.
Rufus Wainwright
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