Quotes from Jeff Tweedy

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 guess I don't think there's any reason to feel guilty about having joy in your life, regardless of how bad things are in the world.

I think art is a consolation regardless of its content. It has the power to move and make you feel like you're not.

Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone.

I always found the concept of a tortured artist distasteful.

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.

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 just try to get inside the song and imagine what comes next.

The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

I was never at my best when I was at my worst. 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.

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?

Stop trying to treat music like it's a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can't be cheap, either.

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

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

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.

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

I've been buying instruments and musical gear for a long time.

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.

We'd been noticing how much more important the internet had become - once information is out there in the world now, anyone can get it. Since that was beginning to happen with the record anyway, we figured, OK, let's just stream it for free ourselves.

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.

I don't think you can be good in life without acknowledging the part of you that isn't good.