Jenny Lewis Quotes

The Clash were the first big love of my life. Lyrically, they inspired me to get out, explore life, and maybe kick some doors down.

Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life... That's a superpower I've been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions.

I don't much enjoy travelling, but I have always longed to take a slow train to Russia. I'd like to go alone - like writers do - with only a pencil and piece of paper as company. I'd take my sketchbook and note down all the wonderful details of other travellers.

Just to know that someone who's 15 years old is listening to my music and the work that I've done - it's definitely a blessing.

When I was a teenager, I went to Europe on a backpacking trip by myself, and I met a woman who was following Sebadoh. It was the early 1990s, and that was my introduction to indie rock.

I still love it. I love lots of other music, too, and always have, but punk's the soundtrack of my youth. I think you never escape the music you're listening to and seeing when you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old.

I will always love the Clash, because I loved them so much when I was fourteen, and I love how you can start a conversation with almost literally any dude about the Clash.

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.

I think the most exciting thing is that you expect people our age to know the music, but actually a lot of kids know the music, and if anything is left, we have left really good music, and that's the important part, not the mop-tops or whatever.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.

Once I got to be about twenty-five, I got interested in the music of the time. I started smokin' dope, I started drinking, I started slowing down and trying to find myself. I didn't want to work in nightclubs.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I went to Ithaca, found the Grateful Dead and my life was changed.

When I was growing up, rock & roll helped give me my sense of identity, but I had to search for it.

Music, especially as an adolescent, helps to build identity because that's when people start developing a sense of self. You can kind of tell based on what music a person listens to what kind of person they'll be pretty much for the rest of their life.

Still, to this day I go back and listen to music that inspires me to write now.

I started playing guitar when I was 13. I'd written a few songs on the guitar over some time. I'd written a book of poetry, and I got a book of lyrics that I had when I was a kid.

When I had arrived in Italy, I had my CD Walkman and about 100 CDs. The song that spoke to me was Kate Bush's 'The Man With the Child in His Eyes,' from 1978.

Music has brought me a lot of emotional moments.

In America, kids would go to college and get out and buy a second-hand car and go across the country and discover America. I never did that; I went from New York to Paris, and New York was my America.

I've always sung in the shower and I watched a lot of 'Rage' when I was young.

I grew up watching 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' and used to dream that I would grow up to be just like her. In a way, 'Teen Wolf' has a lot of those kinds of characters. We're just kids by day, and yet we're trying to fight demons and werewolves and bad people and save people that we love.

I went on a cross-country trip with three buddies to find out what our generation is about. I bought a video camera, started shooting, learned as I went, and ended up with 'Our Time,' a feature-length documentary about what it's like to be young in America. I was hooked.

When I first knew that I wanted to rap I was seven years old and I lost the talent show. It was like spoken word or something. My mom made me do it. It was a Langston Hughes poem. The girl that came on after me, she wound up winning. She was a singer.