Sharon Van Etten Quotes

I write about heartbreak because I like writing about sad things, but I'm writing happy songs, too!

I've written some happy songs but I can't ever play them in public because everybody will just start throwing up.

I just can't seem to write songs about peace and love. Yeah right, how do you get that?

I don't feel I have to write deep and meaningful songs; they can be light and meaningless. It has to do with the place I am in my life, a really good place.

The most entertaining songs don't always come from a nice place. In songs where I think I'm being really sensitive, they seem quite boring actually. I've found that the songs that come out of nastier, more misanthropic places are better.

I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.

I always tell people that it's so much harder to make a happy song than a sad one.

I've written some songs that are pretty scary, but 'Jessica,' 'Ramblin' Man,' and 'Blue Sky' are happy songs. That's the way I wrote them: have-fun tunes to make you feel good.

What a Wonderful World' is a love song to nobody and everybody. I'm thinking about songs like that in my writing with 'Take Me to the Alley.'

I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous.

Not half as much as I’d miss me if you killed me. (He blinked like a girl and leaned against Ash’s shoulder.) Please don’t hurt me, Ash. Please. I don’t want to die while I’m still a virgin. At least let me get laid before you kill me – which according to my mom I can’t do until I’m married and I can’t do that until I finish college. So you have to wait a good ten years before you snuff me. Deal? (Nick)

It was my 16th birthday-my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do-write songs and sing them to people. [...] Everything on this record is what I really wanted to say, and I'm back to being the poet I always thought I was.

With the video for Boulevard of Broken Dreams we were going for something a bit like Ladykillers, you know? Pretty and demented at the same time...like me!

And I could write it better than you ever felt it.

Maggots squirming in your eyeholes...and your other orifices, might be carrying things a bit too far." "This is why I keep you around, Rixon. Always seeing things from the bright side.

Nothing sinister. Just getting exercise. Although some might consider that sinister.

The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.

[From a window in the Writer's Building at MGM, which overlooked a cemetery:] Hello down there. It might interest you to know that up here we are just as dead as you are.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

False happiness is like false money; it passes for a time as well as the true, and serves some ordinary occasions; but when it is brought to the touch, we find the lightness and alloy, and feel the loss.

I am billed as a humorist, but of course I am a tragedian at heart.

I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.

There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing which brings us greater joy and happiness than to think, feel, and say what is ours.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

We also told her you weren't a serial killer," Brit interjected. Cam nodded. "That's a glowing recommendation. Hey, at least he's not a serial killer. I'm going to put that on my Facebook profile.