Glen Hansard's Quotes

I busked from the age of 13 until I was 18.

I guess in a way I just feel blessed to be able to make music.

I only ever really take out my guitar when I'm miserable, which isn't necessarily a very good time to do it.

I won't say I've closed the door on acting.

I've always felt that if I ever got cynical, I would have to stop making music because I'd just be poisoning the air.

I've realized, you know, having turned 40, that rest is just as important as work. In fact, it's equally as important.

Keeping the pen out of your hand as much as possible is the best way to write a song, in my estimation. But the pen must come in to tighten it up.

My dad was quiet, angry, shut down. So my thing is: I express everything that's there. I want to get it all out.

Sometimes travelling really intensely for a long time is like having a continuous nervous breakdown.

There are people who can sit down and write a song about any given subject, and they can do it really, really well.

Well, everything about singing, I learned from busking. Everything I learned about songwriting, I learned from busking.

What happens to us all, I think, when we pick up a pen, is that we just become snobs.

You know, albums are a funny thing. They're not like an intellectual decision. It's a collection of your kind of musings.

And for some reason, when I'm sad, I do listen to Leonard Cohen, I do listen to Joni Mitchell. I do find myself going to the music that's actually reflecting my mood, as opposed to sticking on Motown, which might actually bring my mood up.

I choose to believe that there is good in people and that everything is a lesson. Our place on Earth is to go deeper, to somehow get wiser. To have spirit.

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

I pick up my guitar and play. Something might come, and then the pen comes out. Then an edit, until something comes out that you're actually satisfied with.

If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you're in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you'll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction.

In Irish law, busking is considered vagrancy - you can be arrested for it. It's risky asking people for money in public. So it's not like it's a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money.