Non Lyrical Quotes

HIS ADVICE TO YOUNG SONGWRITERS:: "First, stop trying to imitate what you hear on the radio. Next, exp eriment with my method: try to envision a scene, like one from a movie or play. See the characters, the situation, the setting, everything you can. Then, at the peak, visualize the singer of the song standing on a pitch-dark stage, right in a colum n of intense blue light, with 5,000 people in the audience. The song has got to hold those people completely at that point. The audience should be completely captured."

"Most people don't like extremes - extremes scare them. I start at 'extreme' and go from there. [My songs are] anthems... calls to action, cries against passivity, initiations by fire, doorways flung open, altars uncovered."

"I think rock and opera are probably closer to each other than to other musical forms...Rock and opera both make huge gestures, they're both about extremes in content and form. Each puts incredible physical demands on a performer. And each of them has a great mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, heroism and humor. Seems to me that people's barriers to enjoying both have more to do with sociology than actual music and performances."

"I disagree that it's only role is pleasure, that's just a by-product. Its main role for me, like all the arts, is to provide heightening and amplification. It should intensify everything. I think music should be like plugging yourself into a Marshall amp, it amplifies people, it amplifies images and allows people to see they can be amplified themselves. I think it allows people to see that there's more volume and feedback and sound inside them than they think, plus it allows them to see more volume and intensity around them."

"It's been written that my music's violent, even though it's not a violent as a lot of other music, I think it's 'emotionally' violent. I just always thought that when treating love and sex in songs, it was pretty appropriate to treat them fairly darkly because they're pretty dangerous things. Sex and love are dangerous and good..."

"Sex was never 'safe.' In sex you reveal yourself physically and emotionally - and that's fucking dangerous."

"[Teenagers are] closer to the things in life that are really important. They're closer to the jugular, the feverish, the primal, the urgent, the intuitive aspects of being human."

"I had a little electric organ that I'd bash the shit out of, then hold my bleeding hands up at the end of the set. It seemed to me a very musical thing to do."

"Everything I do comes from the same source," he notes. "I'm telling stories. Human beings have always needed their stories, all the way back to cavemen and campfires."

"I just hate the idea that outside, there's this huge bustling world and all these adults with their responsibilities," he says of the hours he keeps. "That scares me. I like the nighttime, when I can populate a nocturnal wilderness with whatever I want."

"I never feel like I'm writing about the lyrical light side of love. I'm more interested in the darker whirlpool that sucks you in and you're never seen again - the Bermuda Triangle of love."

"With teen-agers, everything is life or death, everything is jugular," Mr. Steinman says. "l love that kind of extremism. I could care less about Paul Simon ruminating on his middle-age thoughts...l always thought opera was an insane form, like rock 'n' roll - very athletic, very extreme and wonderful in its ability to be both thrilling and ridiculous at the same time. All the characters in Wagner operas and Verdi operas - the operas that I love - are teen-agers, and that's what makes it so feverish and intense."

"I would do almost anything for what I create," Steinman says. "I don't know if I would kill someone, but I would consider it. I can be like a savage mother wolf protecting a cub when it comes to a song."

Hannibal Lecter's declaration of self-creation in "The Silence of the Lambs": "I happened."  -  "It's really majestic to me, and inspiring," he explains. "It basically says, very defiantly, that it doesn't matter what anyone did to me. I happened. Every molecule in my body came together to form this unique individual."

"I don't think I identify with [serial killers], but they're fascinating to me. I probably have this perverse respect for their attention span. This is not just some random car-jacking. They work at it for over 20 years. Anything that's particularly obsessive, I'm fascinated by. People who are slaves to obsession are fascinating to me, and that's a great one, serial killers. . . . I still say there's something thrilling about it, not in a legal or societal sense, but just in an aesthetic sense. It's amazing that these people are among us. It makes us astonished at the range of human beings."

"As a teenager, I was just another case of arrested development. My guidance counselor told me I would have been a serial killer if I didn't have such a short attention span."