Top 50 Mark Lanegan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think you can find yourself in life perhaps not really being the master of your own life and it is within your own will and tenacity whether you switch the roles or not.”

— Mark Lanegan

2. “Anything lower than mid-six figures is not going to get me interested in that. And honestly, I just don’t want to.”

— Mark Lanegan

3. “The pleasure of other people is a byproduct of the pleasure that comes from yourself so I cannot judge or look down on someone who does whatever they feel like doing.”

— Mark Lanegan

4. “You run the risk of falling on your face, but, again, music is an individual pursuit – it is made to please yourself first.”

— Mark Lanegan

5. “When LA band L7 were being hit with mud balls, I watched from sidestage as badass singer Donita Sparks pulled out her tampon onstage and threw it at the audience, one of the best responses to rowdy crowd behavior I’d ever seen.”

— Mark Lanegan

6. “I really love that type of music where someone can take a guitar or light instrumentation and a beautiful voice and can send me somewhere.”

— Mark Lanegan

7. “You make music to move people and you don’t get to pick who you move. You just don’t. It’s exclusionary and elitist and I just never felt that way about music, of all things. The great unifier.”

— Mark Lanegan

8. “The more years you put behind you, hopefully making music that surpasses what you did before, you’re playing bigger places and it kind of weirdly becomes a business.”

— Mark Lanegan

9. “There’s just so little mystery left in music or film. It was all that was magical to me as a child.”

— Mark Lanegan

10. “When you get a chance to play with people – informally is one thing, but when you hook up and make something that’s going to last or mean something to someone, I take it very seriously.”

— Mark Lanegan

11. “It’s like soul music, isn’t it all soul music? Otherwise what is it, non-soul music? I-have-no-soul music? Soulless music? People need to put a name on something to identify it, and I understand it.”

— Mark Lanegan

12. “I’ve always been a fan of album covers with no writing on them and have used them a lot in my own groups.”

— Mark Lanegan

13. “I’ve never presented myself as anything less than a flawed person.”

— Mark Lanegan

14. “I think when you’re young and you get together with a group of guys who think like you and you start to make something that moves you as a group of people and you have a common goal, that’s an exciting time.”

— Mark Lanegan

15. “I have been a provoker and I’ll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.”

— Mark Lanegan

16. “I never knew Kurt to be suicidal. I just knew that he was going through a really tough time.”

— Mark Lanegan

17. “The ability to play with different people is infinitely fascinating to me.”

— Mark Lanegan

18. “The absence of a bass player always makes things go faster and hit harder in the high-end range.”

— Mark Lanegan

19. “That was my life in a nutshell: a stolen moment of desperate pleasure, an assful of tiny daggers, then an eternity of agony.”

— Mark Lanegan

20. “My jealousy and bitter resentment over the painful, self-inflicted loss of my former love brought out a negative, sometimes violent reaction. My loss of Anna was still very much a raw, open wound.”

— Mark Lanegan

21. “I think a myth is created from truth.”

— Mark Lanegan

22. “Some people experience freedom in being completely unhinged and lost out on the flip-side of polite society but it takes some balls, a battleship full of psychic willpower or flat-out insanity along with a shitload of stamina and a grip of self-hatred, but no brains at all to find it.”

— Mark Lanegan

23. “Basically I’m always singing about the same stuff whether it’s in a loud or quiet outfit.”

— Mark Lanegan

24. “The word depression had never crossed my mind, never in relation to what I’d been going through, and, in fact, never at all in my entire life. It was not something in my limited categories of feelings, nor was it a characterization I’d have ascribed to myself. “I’m only depressed because no one can tell me what’s wrong with me.”

— Mark Lanegan

25. “You’re charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours.”

— Mark Lanegan

26. “It’s hard to know where you are when you’re trying to read a map by the light of a falling star.”

— Mark Lanegan

27. “Each and every time I walked out into the dark, I only ever came part of the way back.”

— Mark Lanegan

28. “I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”

— Mark Lanegan

29. “You sick SOB! You owe me a Bible, MF-er!” His angry, abbreviated expletives drew huge laughter from everyone on the bus. Turns out I had been rolling joints with pages torn from one of his personal Bibles. I’d not known where the book had come from and used it because it was all I could find.”

— Mark Lanegan

30. “Nearly every single affair was ended by then woman I was with, not me, and they often left with another man and a knife in my back, which I always had coming. I was a natural at losing, but as soon as one thing ended I was already into something else.”

— Mark Lanegan

31. “This is God’s country, or so it is said, but it is also death’s country – don’t forget that.”

— Mark Lanegan

32. “But it was the fear of showing my true heart, at times either so full it might burst or so empty I could cry, that hounded me most viciously. There had been a perpetual war between myself and the costume of persona I’d donned as a youngster and then worn my entire life. Petrified that someone might discover who I really was: merely a child inside the body of an adult.”

— Mark Lanegan

33. “The dysfunctional home life I enjoyed made me place me reliance strictly on myself and nobody else, I trusted no one and no one should have trusted me either, I was only in it for yours truly and stood directly in the centre of the world, the only wolf in the pack.”

— Mark Lanegan

34. “The only memories I could muster were all attached to something I’d rather forget. The future was an unpromising unknown, and I could only look to the long-dead past for comfort, but it seemed as though there was not one unsullied moment to grab onto. I had spent my life in the shadows, facilitating my own and others undoing, taking on nearly any dark task that came my way, every action a means to an end, the end being oblivion.”

— Mark Lanegan

35. “The myopia that largely dogged me my entire life kept me rooted in the here and now, and hardly anything else ever crossed my mind, especially if it was to take place in some far-off distant future never-never land. Such places did not exist in my limited scope of reality.”

— Mark Lanegan

36. “I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.”

— Mark Lanegan

37. “Music was no longer my friend but I left my headphones on round the clock just to keep the outside noise out of my head.”

— Mark Lanegan

38. “I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear.” Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me.”

— Mark Lanegan

39. “The lyrical narrative of the individual songs was rooted in my day-to-day experience: pain, loss, the inner world and trials of someone strung out and struggling. Without comfort or love, searching for what, who knew? But it was something if ever found, might be located on a spiritual plane, not in the physical world.”

— Mark Lanegan

40. “I became aware of a dull, cemetery-dead emptiness inside. I had stopped feeling anything at all. No rage, sadness, fear, nothing. I had finally crossed the line and ceased to give a damn about life, death, or any other meaningless thing in between.”

— Mark Lanegan

41. “The grueling brutality of the past two weeks’ events, no, the dysfunction of my entire life, all of it had brought me to this moment of supreme lunacy, confusing self-laceration, and pain. I faced a tidal wave of dopesickness that was going to obliterate me.”

— Mark Lanegan

42. “This illness also seemed to unlock something in my subconscious, and I was dreaming more than I had ever remembered doing before.”

— Mark Lanegan

43. “I began to have fantasies in which I walked to the centre of a huge field surrounded by forest with trees a mile high, emptied several cans of petrol everywhere, threw a lit Zippo into the grass and then stood in the middle of it waiting to be immolated.”

— Mark Lanegan

44. “I never joined an army, instead I fought an imaginary war my entire life and was the only casualty.”

— Mark Lanegan

45. “The harsh injustice of ageing and the helplessness of infirmity was more than I could take. I swore I would die before I ended up like that.”

— Mark Lanegan

46. “It hit me like a hammer. I realized that, even at this moment when I felt as happy and comfortable with myself as I could ever remember being, the guilt and shame I wore like a noose around my neck was still obvious to this sensitive, intuitive woman. She saw right through me.”

— Mark Lanegan

47. “In the spring of the next year came a third record, The Las Vegas Story, and this trio of albums, all of which I’d been exposed to in the span of just a few months, became my bible. Living in Ellensburg, it was tough to get information about any underground band, much less one like the Gun Club.”

— Mark Lanegan

48. “I’ve never enjoyed being fully present, a muted reality has been the landscape I’ve preferred and mainly inhabited forever. Sure, feeling is good, but not too much, and if someone is able to get away with suffering devastating loss, massive regret, heartache, physical agony, mental instability, isolation, humiliation, abuse, incarceration, depression, tragedy etc. with a blanket of chemical protection, then who can say it’s wrong?”

— Mark Lanegan

49. “I’ve never gone to bed with any monsters, I only woke up with a few dozen or so.”

— Mark Lanegan

50. “Before Layne, I saw everything in strict black and white. He was every beautiful shade of color on the wheel, as well as many that had never been seen before.”

— Mark Lanegan