Jeff Tweedy Quotes

I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.

I think it was Duke Ellington who once said that we're always most pleased with our current record. I mean, you have to assume that you learn from one, and you do something better next time.

When you create stuff, you're always going to be progressing and where you're at a year down the line, as the creator, it's always going to feel immature. You're going to notice the flaws and the things that you've learned in that year aren't going to be there. So, I think it's important to see stuff as a capture of time - that's what I was doing at that time - and not be ashamed of it. That's how I try to approach music.

Perhaps I might be satisfied, momentarily, with a work finished at one sitting, but I would soon get bored looking at it; therefore, I prefer to continue working on it so that later I may recognize it as a work of my mind.

I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.

You think you're developing and getting better and then you see something you did years ago. Looking at your early work.. sometimes it has a depth that surprises you.

If I feel like I've reached this greatness in my career than there's no more room for growth. I don't think I'm ever going to get there. If I ever get complacent, it's time for me to bow out.

I'm not trying to change the face of hip-hop music. I'm trying to make my records and always take the next step for me.

Sometimes when I look back on myself on those earlier records, there was so much effort going in, so much trying. With this, I was trying to make it much more laid back.

I don't know if I'll ever be a master at anything, but I think that's a mistake for me personally. I don't know how much it's about the journey, but it's more about the process.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

Once I slow down because I think I have reached my peak, then my skills will go nowhere but down

For me, I am constantly forcing myself to evolve, because, I think, to stagnate creatively - there's a certain death that happens with that. Because if you're not moving forward and you're not evolving, you're devolving, and I don't want to go backwards. I want to be better at what I do tomorrow than I am today. I don't want to be worse.

If you don't think that you're the best, how do you become the best?

I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

Writing about craft has forced me to think more about my own writing technique, and to break down my process in ways that have been enormously helpful to me.

Success doesn't come from pie-in-the-sky thinking. It's the result of consciously doing something each day that will add to your overall excellence.

I think that we, as human beings, always need to conquer our fears and reach beyond our grasp and I think it's very important that we don't become complacent or stagnant.

I just love learning. I think learning is how you live. The verb of my life is learning.

It takes me a long time to change. I don't think you can just go out and figure out a bunch of visual ideas and photograph. The change happens in living and not through thinking.

The Class Clown album was done totally sober. I'd realized what a hell I'd made for myself and I cleaned up completely for three months. You can hear the clarity of my thinking and of my speech on that album.

You have to be very productive in order to become excellent. You have to go through a poor period and a mediocre period, and then you move into your excellent period. It may be very well be that some of you have done quite a bit of writing already. You maybe ready to move into your good period and your excellent period. But you shouldn't be surprised if it becomes a very long process.

It's always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further.

Once you make something you think it's awesome, but it's only after you listen to it for a few weeks then you actually get a proper perspective on it.

If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can't let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high.