John Flansburgh famous quotes

In an interview John [Linnell] said, 'At a certain point you just get tired of the way the other person breathes,' and I took that pretty hard because I, personally, am infatuated with the way John breathes.
-- John Flansburgh

#Tired #Way #Interviews

It's hard to tell a shallow person that they should care more about the feelings of the awkward and the alienated.
-- John Flansburgh

#Awkward #Feelings #Care

Have you heard Alanis Morisette trying to play the harmonica? She doesn't know how to play the harmonica. Well guess what, Alanis, I INVENTED the 'don't-know-how-to-play-harmonica-harmonica-solo.'
-- John Flansburgh

#Play #Trying #Harmonicas

That's what I call 'Guiliani Time', my friends. 'We've got a problem. Let's kill it.'
-- John Flansburgh

#Problem

Look, up in the sky! It's the sky!
-- John Flansburgh

#Sky #Looks #Look Up

Worlds going to hell anyway, have a good time.
-- John Flansburgh

#World #Good Times #Hell

If you do believe in science, you really have to actually stand up and make a stand for it. You can't just say, the facts aren't in. Science is always looking for better explanations to everything, but that doesn't mean that when we get on a plane we don't know what's supposed to happen next. And if it doesn't go the way that it's planned, that's a big, big problem. The culture wars are very tricky and make me a little sad.
-- John Flansburgh

#War #Believe #Mean

I wrote a thirty-second song that I couldn't finish for a year.
-- John Flansburgh

#Song #Years #Thirty

I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about aliens, but I think it seems possible that there's life forms beyond our solar system.
-- John Flansburgh

#Sleep #Thinking #Worry

There have been times I wanted to cry on interview, but it hasn't been because that's what they're trying to conjure. No. I think you have to graduate to some higher level of TV IQ for people to actually want to see you cry.
-- John Flansburgh

#Thinking #People #Trying

When we're on tour, probably we don't go 24 hours without someone asking us where we came up with the name They Might Be Giants. Which, on one level, seems like a completely legitimate question. If I think of other bands, like The Beatles, it would explain to me that John Lennon had a proclivity for slightly cheap puns. But I'm not sure how much insight that would give me into what's actually good about The Beatles' music.
-- John Flansburgh

#Thinking #Giving #Hours

To a lot of people, angels are a matter of faith.
-- John Flansburgh

#Angel #People

Sometimes you have to wonder if there isn't an ejector seat built into having a popular-music career. We were lucky when we started. We were already old when we started - you could have described our first album as "aging Brooklyn guys." We were in our late 20s. We weren't octogenarians, but a lot of bands were already younger than us. Fortunately, we've held on to our manly good looks.
-- John Flansburgh

#Guy #Lucky #Aging

For instance, our music, They Might Be Giants, has this element of humor, which is probably the most uptight part of what we include in our music, because we're in part very self-conscious guys, and we want our music to stand up to the test of time, not just be visceral comedy records. We love humor and comedy, but there's this aspect to it that runs counter to what is included in most music.
-- John Flansburgh

#Running #Guy #Comedy

There's so many simple things that can be done to change our carbon footprint, and to reduce our carbon footprint.
-- John Flansburgh

#Simple #Done #Footprint

I guess the revival of vinyl records is not helping the environmental problem. Although, in some ways, people don't throw records away - I mean, I still have records from when I was 5. So it doesn't seem quite so wasteful. But maybe I'm just lying to myself.
-- John Flansburgh

#Lying #Mean #People

We've been a band longer than most of the people reading this have been alive.
-- John Flansburgh

#Reading #People

We want to be original. To express our most interesting stuff. But you don't see the word "original" come up very often to describe big bands. Our job isn't to pigeonhole ourselves or describe where we fit in. Our goal isn't to fit in. Our goal is to be free of all that stuff.
-- John Flansburgh

#Goal #Interesting #Fit

Between me and my wife, there's this joke where I'll be doing some fun interview, and I'll get off the phone and be like, "That guy was an idiot." A lot of times, interviews are like being asked a list of questions. Invariably, there will be this part where they think you're a writer for Letterman: "Just off the top of your head, tell me the 10 most influential bands on you." And you're actually asked to come up with a spontaneous list. It's like, "Dude, I'm not living in High Fidelity."
-- John Flansburgh

#Fun #Thinking #Wife

I feel like musicians have such a precarious place in the political discourse, because musicians are, sort of just by nature, people-pleasers.
-- John Flansburgh

#Political #Musician

Actually, on a slightly more serious but kind of parallel level, I remember being on Loveline before both hosts ascended into loftier places in the culture. But I remember being shocked by Dr. Drew. He went into this extended monologue about how anyone with a baby voice is probably the victim of child abuse or has some daddy issue. As an intellectually curious person, all I could think is that there isn't any clinical evidence about that. But to be the guy wearing the doctor's hat on the radio and teaching everybody about this? It just seemed like a parody of good advice.
-- John Flansburgh

#Baby #Children #Teaching

Bill O'Reilly knew he could just filibuster and enjoy all the airtime that a full interview would give him, and then also grab the sensationalist headlines that he enjoys creating. He used this as fodder for his show for weeks. I wouldn't want to be on the bad side of Bill O'Reilly. But then again, maybe I am now. By giving this interview.
-- John Flansburgh

#Giving #Week #Enjoy

Sometimes people will ask a real "Why are you beating your wife?" question where there's some assumption built into it, and all you're trying to do is kind of re-contextualize it with some element of truth, and it comes across as incredibly defensive, or just really weird.
-- John Flansburgh

#Real #People #Wife

We're affable guys in They Might Be Giants. We're not gonna do the periscope-down thing, but it's a little bit mind-bending. The biggest struggle is trying to figure out a way to back up far enough in your answer that it can be read without the context of the question. Every declarative statement you see that comes out of an interview with somebody is actually in response to a question. So it's sort of like this very real interpersonal dance where one of the people involved is invisible.
-- John Flansburgh

#Real #Struggle #People

You have to define how much of a cultural politician you are as a performer. There are times where I just want to remain a civilian.
-- John Flansburgh

#Politician