Jenny Lewis Quotes

I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need.

I'm not afraid to use my personal experiences and put them into a song. I think that's when you get the best stuff anyway, when it's real emotion.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

I never try and tune anything out. I think that's a mistake. You want to bring all the honest stuff that's going on inside you into your work. Otherwise, you're keeping a lot of authenticity out.

I'm a big emotional mess. I try to talk about things that people don't like to talk about, especially in music. Hopefully it reaches someone and lets them access their vulnerability. That's what I want it to accomplish.

Nobody can tell you you're wrong for writing a song about how you feel - even if you don't really feel that way.

It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.

If Rihanna stripped it all down morally rather than with her clothes, perhaps we'd get closer to Nina Simone. She's talented, but all we want is to sing the truth. If Britney Spears was to sing closer to her heart, she might have been the new Bobby Gentry or Dolly Parton.

Write what you really care about. Write what you want to say because that is the experience that always rates as genuine on the page.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

I'm not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Each step of the way, I'm learning. When I leave an interview, I learn whether I feel, 'Oh, that was nice,' or that made me feel like a little piece of me was taken.

The hardest thing for - not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.

I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.

Reading English novels I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate.

A lot of the work I've done has been about being very raw and open with your emotions.

The biggest thing that I hope people take away when they listen to my music is that they feel that there is an outlet being presented that allows them to be more authentic and for them to be more honest in their own lives.

I find it quite hard to connect with the songs where I portray myself as this clumsy, adorable, love-struck man-child.

I started to feel songwriting was pulling different pieces of my heart out - the more I started writing, the more there was honesty.

All of my favorite artists who inspired me were never afraid to be uncool and never afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves - no matter how much flak they took for it.