Brownstein Quotes & Sayings

I'm kind of a hermit - it's almost easier for me to write about connection than to actually connect. — Carrie Brownstein

That's why all those records from high school sound so good. It's not that the songs were better - it's that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

I think hypochondria always plays a part in the healthcare landscape. — Carrie Brownstein

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

Here I was in a group of women, allies, I thought, colleagues, and I felt like I was being shamed for the relatively modest success I had achieved. But Instead of sticking up for myself, I apologized. — Carrie Brownstein

to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. — Carrie Brownstein

Just invest in apps. Just download apps and then pay yourself the dividend. — Carrie Brownstein

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

Art communities and music scenes want to pretend like they don't care, but they will also tell you louder and more frequently than anyone that they DON'T CARE. — Carrie Brownstein

At my first library job, I worked with a woman named Sheila Brownstein, who was The Reader's Advisor. She was a short, bosomy Englishwoman who accosted people at the shelves and asked if they wanted advice on what to read, and if the answer was yes, she asked what writers they already loved and then suggested somebody new. — Elizabeth McCracken

I always felt that the most common thread in my life from when I was young until now has been a highly observant, very analytical mind. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways. — Carrie Brownstein

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

The inexplicable is its own form of freedom. Belonging is not a form of restriction. We can't name the feeling but we can sing along. — Carrie Brownstein

There is a direness in the construction of safety, in the telling of theretofore untold stories. — Carrie Brownstein

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

It's very common to think that we're always evolving, that we've changed so much from our younger selves, that within decades we've transformed into these different people. We like to think that. I feel in some ways that I am still so much my younger self. There are ways that I'm different: I feel like I'm wiser and kinder. But I think a lot of the impulses are still the same. I learned that. — Carrie Brownstein

People are wearing fleece, which is a hard fabric to be angry in. — Carrie Brownstein

I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now. — Carrie Brownstein

The notion of "female" should be so sprawling and complex that it becomes divorced from gender itself. — Carrie Brownstein

What I value most in new music is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that. — Carrie Brownstein

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

Nothing is as nice as plugging in your guitar and turning up the volume really loud, just seeing what kind of beautiful noise you can make with it. — Carrie Brownstein

We would go out and play these songs and people could interpret them however the hell they wanted. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

There is a stillness about the past, a clarity, the way it had been somewhat defined and dissected, in the rearview mirror; it was there for the taking, for the mining. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

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

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

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic. — Carrie Brownstein

It's important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn't come too easily. 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. — Carrie Brownstein

My story starts with me as a fan. And to be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved. All the affection I poured into bands, into films, into actors and musicians, was about me and my friends. — Carrie Brownstein

I've always been interested in queerness and underground and fringe and periphery, and who and what flourishes in those spaces. Those spaces that are darker and dingier and more dangerous, more lonely. What comes out of there, to me, is the life force. I'm excited when the center reaches over to those places and pulls inspiration from them, and translates it for a lot of people. — Carrie Brownstein

I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own. — Carrie Brownstein

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. — Carrie Brownstein

Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; — Carrie Brownstein

It was about having a box in the attic or basement or attic or garage, something we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us, this is where we were last year, and this is where we'll stay, and this is where we'll pile on the memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it's blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can't name because it's so new. — Carrie Brownstein

I've always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring. — Carrie Brownstein

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

Even then, I could still appreciate the moment of simply making sounds with a group of people. There is another place you go to in those instances, and it feels vast, refreshing, like you're creating your own air to breathe. And even though it's never going to happen again and there's a palpable sense of mediocrity, there's still a connection that you wouldn't have otherwise, to the sound, to the people. — Carrie Brownstein

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

"We can't name it, but we can sing along." That is my ultimate relationship to any art form, but especially music. — Carrie Brownstein

I got kind of tired of playing, I think. But I think it will be part of my life again, maybe. — Carrie Brownstein

I have to erase my Google search histories, because they always lead to an obituary. — Carrie Brownstein

Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth, it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

I was shut off from my body; I had barely thought about sexuality or longing. Up until this point, my sexual experiences had felt business like or even transactional...I hadn't been suppressing urges or denying my needs. I didn't feel like I had any, not corporeal ones. My journal entries from that time speak to depression and feelings of isolation, fears that a friend would leave, a sense that I had been responsible for my mother's departure and would therefore cause anyone I loved or needed to leave. I was still spending most of my time in my head. I was removed from my own feelings. — Carrie Brownstein

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

I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

I love coffee. I love a midday espresso on set, just for the energy. — Carrie Brownstein

Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about. — Carrie Brownstein

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

It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts. — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

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

(Like a lot of middle-class kids, I needed my punk rock and rebellion underwritten by my parents.) — Carrie Brownstein

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

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

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

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

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

These new bands sound like Gang of Four - if Gang of Four sucked. — Carrie Brownstein

To me, the grotesque is like a sonic manifestation of reality. I don't know how you could look out onto our world and see only beauty. And I like beautiful things. I like the aesthetically harmonious. But I am much more attracted to something that is off-kilter. It is a truer reflection of not only nature, but the human spirit - the state of the world. I just think everything feels a little off. — Carrie Brownstein

I'm interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I've never quite been able to shake that. — Carrie Brownstein

I need a template of a template — Carrie Brownstein

Entitlement is a precarious place from which to create or perform - it projects the idea that you have nothing to prove, nothing to claim, nothing to show but self-satisfaction, a smug boredom. It breeds ambivalence. It's as if instead of having to prove they are something, these musicians prove they aren't anything. It's an inverted dynamic, one that sets performers up to fail, but also gives them a false sense of having already arrived. I don't understand how someone would not push, challenge, or at least be present, how anyone could get onstage and not give everything. — Carrie Brownstein

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

I think cultural criticism and long-form critique have their place and their purpose. But for a creator, it's so easy for the discussion surrounding a phenomenon to usurp the phenomenon itself. It's worse, of course, with comment sections on websites and blogs, particularly anonymous comments, or the incessant chatter and opinions on social media. Everyone gets to write a headline, and when you or the thing you do is being talked about, you get to feel like a headline - an addicting feeling for sure, but also a pernicious one. The discourse builds its own body, and it's usually a monster. — Carrie Brownstein

We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate. — Carrie Brownstein

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

[I hate] the ways that people want their special needs to be met, whether it's their food allergies or their special lotions or shoes. Or the ways that people want their neighborhoods and restaurants curated in a way that's really tailored to them. Growing up with someone who was living by these very strict, repressive rules for themselves - it made me very allergic to the idea of denial. — Carrie Brownstein

Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce. — Carrie Brownstein

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

If you always want to look relevant, just be CGI-prepared. — Carrie Brownstein

I was a sprinter - there were no long-term goals, — Carrie Brownstein

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

Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own. — Tama Janowitz

You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity. — Carrie Brownstein

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

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music. — Carrie Brownstein

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

At that age I thought apartments were built specifically to house the single or the newly single, a divorce dormitory of sorts. — Carrie Brownstein

A certain kind of exhaustion sets in from having to constantly explain and justify one's existence or participation in an artistic or creative realm. What a privilege it must be to never have to answer the question "How does it feel to be a woman playing music?" or "Why did you choose to be in an all-female band?" The people who get there early have to work the hardest. — Carrie Brownstein

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

Sometimes I think that the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown. — Carrie Brownstein

At nineteen, you can make out for hours, that goal-less, amorphous melting into someone else. — Carrie Brownstein

I think proteins are really good for your brain. And your brain is where comedy comes from. — Carrie Brownstein

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

I'm all about being prudent. And I've started to appreciate experiences more than actual objects. — Carrie Brownstein

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