Top 40 Lykke Li Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Driving, for me, means power and freedom. The feeling that I can go anywhere I want at any time is exhilarating.”

— Lykke Li

2. “I believe life’s too short for compromises and bad fitting jeans.”

— Lykke Li

3. “I am such a complex person. I have so many different layers of my personality to choose from. I am super-sensitive, and I am super-strong.”

— Lykke Li

4. “I’m looking forward to some peace and quiet. I fantasize about having a home, which I’ve kind of never had.”

— Lykke Li

5. “My whole art is based on escaping life and reality, which might not the best tendency to have when you’re trying to be a good person in general. But people can escape into my world easily – artists are supposed to create a keyhole that people can look into.”

— Lykke Li

6. “I can cry myself to sleep because I’m not as great as Leonard Cohen, but who cares? Maybe you can’t be as great as some people, but it’s a tragedy when you don’t follow your dreams.”

— Lykke Li

7. “If you’re being ignored, that’s a good time to concentrate on finding yourself and creating your own mystery.”

— Lykke Li

8. “I hate the fact you always feel like you have to be going somewhere, like the end destination is to be finished, or to be happy. But the truth is a lot of us are completely lost, and we don’t know, and that is also a state of mind, to not know who you are and where you’re going.”

— Lykke Li

9. “I felt such a deep connection with dolphins. I felt like they were the only ones who understood me.”

— Lykke Li

10. “I don’t love all hip-hop, but I do relate to stuff like early Nas, 2Pac, Biggie, and MF Doom because they’re also trying to escape a scenario.”

— Lykke Li

11. “I know that I’m dealing with some kind of wound through my music.”

— Lykke Li

12. “In every person’s life, around 27 to 29 years old, the stars and the planets align themselves to exactly the way they were when you were born. You’re faced with yourself. There’s no running away.”

— Lykke Li

13. “People comment on how you look, it’s so unnecessary. I just wanted people to listen to what I have to say instead of focusing on anything else.”

— Lykke Li

14. “Los Angeles is such a mysterious place because there’s so much evil in that city, but there’s also so much light. You can be totally alone on a hillside and I love that kind of secluded, deserted rawness.”

— Lykke Li

15. “I’m a really restless person; I’m tired of the way I sounded or looked yesterday. So it’s hard to hang onto this image of me as this young Swedish female in this world.”

— Lykke Li

16. “I lived five years in Portugal and then spent winters in Nepal or India.”

— Lykke Li

17. “I’m really depressing. Some people watch comedy to relax. I watch 21 Grams. I can recognize sadness and tragedy really easily because it’s been with me forever.”

— Lykke Li

18. “I’m a girl from Sweden. I took a lot of risks and went to New York by myself when I was 19 just because I read about it in a few books. I came here knowing nobody, having no money, and now I’m doing all these things like making records and videos every day.”

— Lykke Li

19. “I was totally romanticizing the idea of Los Angeles when the Doors, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young were hanging out there.”

— Lykke Li

20. “Sometimes women are so great and powerful, but then they surrender to these vain things. They kind of fall for it.”

— Lykke Li

21. “I feel it’s so important to have strong women around you.”

— Lykke Li

22. “I probably thought that about most of the things I did. But you wind up in situations where you have to make decisions very quickly, and you just go for it a lot of the time.”

— Lykke Li

23. “I had to do this album. I tried thinking, “I’m not going to do it.” But then I’m sitting there getting all suicidal and depressed, and I just start writing. It’s like this inner drive. If I could choose, I would probably be living in the countryside and be fine with that, but I’m not.”

— Lykke Li

24. “The key to a good life is finding things that you want to master.”

— Lykke Li

25. “I relate to hustlers who want to get out of where they are and create something different for themselves.”

— Lykke Li

26. “Life is greater when I’m dealing with something than when I’m just dreaming away.”

— Lykke Li

27. “I would want to create an amphitheater outside of California where I would play everyday, and then people would have to come to me. I would create all this crazy stage decor and film it. Or I would just stay inside my home and do films. I would be like the modern Maya Deren.”

— Lykke Li

28. “It’s not a very sane thing to try to be great all the time. You want to make something magical; you want to make something wonderful; you want to give to everybody; you want to heal people; you want to still be inspired. That’s not easy.”

— Lykke Li

29. “I do it live on tape with a band. It’s not like I’m doing electronic music with a laptop.”

— Lykke Li

30. “After you’ve been wounded a few times, it’s hard to let somebody get that deep again.”

— Lykke Li

31. “I don’t think Neil Young has a beautiful voice but it’s something that grabs you and the songs are so good.”

— Lykke Li

32. “I hung out with some crazy desert people. One guy was just walking around with only shorts on – he’d been walking with bare feet for the last two years. He was totally scarred and eating on all fours like a dog.”

— Lykke Li

33. “I always want to keep things unwritten. I’m inspired by Bob Dylan, who’s kept evolving and changing his sound. I think that’s what you should do as an artist. Why be comfortable?”

— Lykke Li

34. “Of course, there are a lot of things I’m angry about in the world.”

— Lykke Li

35. “I wanted to create something really aggressive and psychedelic.”

— Lykke Li

36. “I was 21 and homeless – such a broken, lost woman.”

— Lykke Li

37. “I was 19 when I recorded my first album, and I’ve been exposed to many things during these last few years; all the baby fat is gone.”

— Lykke Li

38. “I’m from Sweden so I don’t enjoy winter at all; there’s nothing cute about it.”

— Lykke Li

39. “You can’t stay in the desert, you go nuts after 24 hours.”

— Lykke Li

40. “I’m not so interested in being indie just for the sake of being indie.”

— Lykke Li

41. “It’s not a very sane thing to try to be great all the time.”

— Lykke Li

42. “I don’t necessarily love all the collaborations that I’ve done; the more I work with other people, the more I realize that I want to work with myself.”

— Lykke Li

43. “It would be amazing if people listened to it when they needed shelter; it would be lovely if they didn’t spit on it.”

— Lykke Li

44. “Do you have to have emotional turmoil to create music? I’m not sure because I’ve never been without it.”

— Lykke Li

45. “I want to get my music out there. I enjoy playing shows; I just don’t enjoy airports. I want to be more creative, but it’s hard to get into that zone on tour.”

— Lykke Li

46. “I dove into the craziness and did things that maybe I would think twice about when I get older.”

— Lykke Li