Jenny Lewis Quotes

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs.

My advice is: if you've got to be miserable to write great music, then drive a truck.

Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music.

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

I unfortunately do suffer for my art.

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.

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.

Performing was how I was able to release this pain I had.

The topics just kind of come to me. If they are relevant, it's because they're happening in the world around me, and it's affecting me. Poetry is my way of dealing with it.

Sometimes I hate writing songs. Because it hurts sometimes. I'm very emotional.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

I wrote my songs despite the fact that I was a drunk, not because of it.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

creative people always suffer from depression because we're so super sensitive and special?

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

It's been so much a part of my life the thinking that I go through is crucial. I found that if I don't paint for around a week, I get practically suicidal. It took a long time to figure out why I had these mood swings, and I finally figured out it's because I haven't painted.

Suffering for your art is most definitely overrated but I do get a certain, I don't know, satisfaction from being able to deal with my paranoia and insecurity.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

I always write my music based on what is going on in my life at the time.

The idea of writing songs because you're depressed and you need to communicate it somehow, that isn't really true for me.

Like I can't cry for myself so I will let this song take all of the things inside I can't let anyone else see and offer it up, as if the sound were some kind of god, and my pain is some kind of sacrifice.