Jens Lekman Quotes

I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write, because that tends to be a little forced.

I end up writing about all kinds of things. I never make an attempt to write about anything in particular. I don't have a little list of topics to write about.

The muse holds no appointments. You can never call on it. I don't understand people who get up at 9 o'clock in the morning, put on the coffee and sit down to write.

You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

I basically just write stream of consciousness to a certain extent. I let the song kind of go where it wants to go.

I used to do three or four songs a day, just write them - boom, boom, boom, and done - because of how spontaneous I was.

It's gotta feel natural. I'm always into that, and after awhile, if I am working on a song too long and trying to make something out of it that it's not... it's best just to stop and move on.

I'm often just writing just to write. I'm not writing with...If I write, like, sitting down with a goal in mind, it's always, like, the worst. It turns into a ska song even if I'm trying to write like a horror movie sound track or something.

For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan.

I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.

I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.

I write just knowing that I enjoy writing. But if I have to write, it seems like nothing comes. But when I go there for my own pleasure, the Lord might just give me loads of stuff all at once.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.

I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane.

I don't know what any of my songs are about. I don't sit down to write about anything. They're about whatever you want. I don't pick subjects. I just start.

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

Because my musical background is so diverse, it lends me to have very much my own style and it helps me to relate to the music as I'm going to play it. I just write. And if it comes out country, it's a country song. The funny thing is, I write all across the board. I just write what hits me at the time.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.

I simply don't understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it's lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.