Justin Vernon Quotes

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

Nostalgia has always been a key player in my songwriting cause within that space I find a great deal of inspiration.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

I try to think of the songs as little movies. They're always pretty visual to me. I can always sort of see them. I don't always know what the end result is going to be, and I don't know exactly what it's going to sound like, but I can kinda see them.

It's rather mystifying when you think about writing songs - where they come from, and how they're born.

I don't want to sing songs and write songs that need to have images behind them that are of a specific time. The times we live in today - I mean, there's a lot to work with. But I think that if I was my age in 1975 or 1985, I would have felt the same way because that's what I gravitate toward.

It varies, I don't think there is any one set way of writing songs or coming up with ideas, it comes in so many ways you know.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

When I write something that would have made me laugh as a 10-year-old, or would have scared me or would have excited me, I know I'm onto something.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

The key to songwriting is just to be able to observe, and put yourself in situations to be around people, and let those ideas come to you.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

I really enjoyed being Peppy Miller. She was an amazing character and her energy followed me everywhere. When I talk about her I want to be her again.

I'm still driven by the feeling I had when I wrote my first book or read a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle adventure.

I'll never forget when me and Jason Matthews wrote the line, 'Don't be a tape player hater,' in 'Country Man,' I don't think I ever laughed harder. We didn't know where we were gonna put that in a song, but we knew we had to make it into a song. I just remember laughing and being so proud of such a goofy little line.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

I always wanted to be a children's author, and I have a really big library of children's books. All the ones from when I was little, they are just so beautiful. I read kids' books, and they calm me down.

It's so fun to make up stories, but I find that the songs that I'm most proud of came from a real thing in my life - 'Peter Pan' being one of those.