Jeff Tweedy Quotes

Everything alive must die. Every building built to the sky will fall. Don't try to tell me my everlasting love is a lie.

I don't like being in public with headphones on. I don't know how people can do it. It seems like you're so cut off from your environment. I feel like I'd get hit by a car.

What you once were isn't what you want to be anymore.

I still love poetic imagery. I love the idea of using surrealist speak to generate lyrical content and I love the way English can be exciting in and of itself.

You have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.

Anybody who'd expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It's so antithetical to being a musician.

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are downloading our music, they're listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.

I know my lies are always wishes.

I am an American aquarium drinker.

Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.

I don't know if experimental is a word I would ever use comfortably.

For the most part I stand by all of records. I just always like the one I've done most recently the best and I think that's the whole point.

I think the songs are more about relationships that are endless.

I don't really feel like you're making a record unless you pay attention to it.

I've never been healthier. I haven't had a cigarette in two years. I run four or five miles, four or five times a week. I've been healthy and having a really good time.

I always listen to records that I've been a part of with a grain of salt.

I'm usually pretty happy. I don't ever really get disturbed in any way, or feel like I need to go back and change something.

I think that there's a lot of good will that exists between musicians and the people that support them and listen to them.

I always think I don't have any songs, I don't have anything I'm working on, and I get in the studio and realize there are 20 things I'm thinking about. It's just kind of second nature.

I don't know where people get the idea that every Wilco record is supposed to have drama. OK, I guess historically speaking we've had our fair share of ups and downs.

All my lies are only wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new.

I don't believe every download is a lost sale.

When I did do good stuff in the past, it was because I was able to transcend the parts of my being that weren't healthy.

I don't think there is anything hard at all about having a lot of songs. It makes it easier to be less precious about them, and know that everybody's going to want to work on some of them.

I have always thought it was important to maintain some connection for myself to what it takes to make a song work by myself, to put a song across to an audience by myself.

Once you're an addict, you're always an addict, so just because I found something good to do doesn't mean I'm not going to hurt myself doing it.

When you listen to most of the records that really had an impact on you, they always seem to be from a different era.

With some bands, there's a fear that if people do other things, the band is going to change and not hold it together. That's kind of sad; if you love someone, set them free, right?

I always think its easier for me to write without thinking about the strict meter that's required for songs and song structures and things like that. It's much easier to just write on the page.

I honestly don't remember the book well enough to register any surprise about anything. I don't remember anything being shocking to me.

I like making songs up. Whether or not they're great songs or good songs, whatever. It's something I've always done, and I definitely feel like I've gotten better at it.

I still have a lot of faith that there's very few people who are savvy enough to actually produce a good sounding copy of the record.

Internet is radio for a lot of people. It's a place to get music and hear music, and no amount of clamping down will change that.

My highest aspirations as a songwriter are that people would sing my songs or know songs I've written sometime in as far into the future as I feel comfortable seeing.

That's something that I think as a songwriter you have to ask yourself - why you're doing it. The world certainly doesn't need more songs. Are you doing it just for your ego?

I'm very, very suspicious of anybody that finds a belief system that they feel can explain it all, for themselves or for anybody else.

I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.