Jens Lekman Quotes

You're an enormous sponge and everything goes in there and you squeeze it out in songs, I guess. And if you're a painter, you squeeze them out on to a canvas.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

I think they saw me as something like a deliverer, a way out. My means of expression, my music, was a way in which a lot of people wished they could express themselves and couldn't.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better.

I love writing and directing because it's great therapy. Every project I've done, there's been a personal connection.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

Writing is how I metabolize life and how I give and receive.

When I'm writing, it's the weirdest thing: it's not even a conscious process. I'm not even thinking when I write, and then all of a sudden, I'll have a song that makes me feel so much better than I did before.

It was difficult for me to feel my feelings, so I just buried them. Then I found that acting was a way for me to get them out. But now that I'm a reasonably sane adult, acting is more about my trying to engage other people: Acting is cathartic for the viewer as well.

It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.

These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.

I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the biggest thrill in my life.

I was inspired to create 'My Life' so I could finally share a personal part of my life beyond my music.

Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.

I've never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.

I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.

I don't end up playing a lot of likable characters, so I find myself living in a lot of unlikable skin. As a result of that, I don't always feel good. I get a lot more catharsis from taking pictures or painting or making short films.

Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.

I think artists should really write more.

I'd say, at the end of the day, you know, from a songwriting practice standpoint, you write songs to make yourself feel something true and validating, and cathartic, maybe, and then whoever responds to it is, like, out of your control.

Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.