Jens Lekman Quotes

Sometimes I wake up and think, 'How did I get here?'

I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I'm sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don't even know when you're being compromised till after the fact, and that's what you regret.

Looking back, I wonder where my head was at on some of the last few albums, and I know I was just doing what I thought I needed to at the time.

Oh my god what am I doing with my life?

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

When I entered the jungle for 'I'm A Celebrity,' my confidence was so low.

I honestly have never really even watched some other things I've done. I don't like doing that to be honest.

When I look back at the record and listen to it, I can sort of see where I was at when I was making it - these brief little moments, different places I was at emotionally.

The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things.

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.

I have always tried to avoid regrets. Could I have done differently some things in my career? Maybe.

Writers - human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

I'm not good," he said, piercing me with eyes that absorbed all light but reflected none, "but I was worse.

Before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied by myself.

Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

Sometimes, I think there's a lack of ambition in me. But then sometimes, I think, no, you can, like William Blake said, you know, see heaven in a grain of sand. If you look really, really closely at a situation, you can find almost endless interest in it.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.