Women are presented with a very narrow aspect of the female narrative. And now we live in a culture and a time where it gets to us very quickly and very young. So how do you maintain in a child that sense of unique identity before they get thrown all that is projected on them?

Laura Marling

If I don't have an outlet in which to express myself...throug h songwriting or other mediums...I get a bit jittery.

Laura Marling

outlets mediums songwriting

I sound awful saying it but I think it can be like that. I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. And not just boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. They find themselves in stagnant friendships. If people were a little less scared [of ending things] they'd get more out of life… You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfil a certain something in your life. You fulfil something in theirs. But there's a time limit to that. Unless you choose to be bloody good company for the rest of your life, do you know what I mean?

Laura Marling

girlfriend mean thinking

A friend is a friend forever

Laura Marling

friends-forever forever

In my experience, the psychological aspect of femininity tends to be more receptive and apathetic and delicate. I think that because the feminine is a bit quieter, we live in a masculine-dominated society. It is the front-forward force that runs the world. And that's not the fault of men by any means, that's just the way the world works.

Laura Marling

running men mean

I've got my laptop, but it troubles me in many ways. I don't have Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It ruins a romantic idea, which might just be an illusion, a sense of depth or continuity. I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.

Laura Marling

technology unique character

I don't have much to complain about in life, because I've lived a very privileged existence and continue to. I just think, What if I didn't have that confidence or strength of character, and I was left with certain perceptions of what a woman's place is in the world?

Laura Marling

perception character thinking

The female psyche is inherently self-sufficient, because female sexuality is inherently self-sufficient. I think women are maybe more comfortable, or women are able to find physical beauty in each other that doesn't terrify them.

Laura Marling

female self thinking

I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.

Laura Marling

careers successful men

Oh! To not need cognitive justification for every single thing. Wouldn't that be a life?

Laura Marling

cognitive justification needs

I can't give up that quick

Laura Marling

giving-up life-is waiting

One woman I interviewed, Amanda Ghost, said, "Let's not bullshit, there are no women at the top of the music business, and that is a serious problem." And I said, "Yes!" And I didn't shy away from saying that. But I still don't want to be in the firing line. I'm not clever or witty or brave enough to get into the political nitty-gritty with it.

Laura Marling

bullshit clever witty

I would never sit and write a song in front of anyone, because you're so vulnerable. I don't know at what point in the process that it becomes acceptable to pass them on. When a song wants to be written, it will be written. When it does come, I will very rarely go back and edit lyrics. I'm quite a rational human being, and the only part of my life that I can't rationalise, or can't make sense of, is how a song gets written or why.

Laura Marling

doe writing song

I was an incredibly misanthrope. I couldn't relate to people my age, and I'm not sure why, as I wasn't particularly smart or interesting

Laura Marling

smart people interesting

It took a lot of time and practice for me to realise that there's no point trying to be something you're not.

Laura Marling

realising practice trying

Living in L.A., I was completely lost - and I enjoyed it.

Laura Marling

enjoyed lost

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night.

Laura Marling

night country book

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

Laura Marling

writing song sometimes

Age is relative. Experience is relative. And I think often intensity is confused with maturity.

Laura Marling

confused maturity thinking

Rilke has a very bizarre relationship to women because his mother had an older child, a girl who died when she was a baby. So when Rilke was born she named him Sophie and dressed him as a girl until he was 7. And psychologically, the repercussions of that made him the genius that he is. By the time he was 35, he was continuously falling in love with older women, mother figures, spiritual mothers.

Laura Marling

girl spiritual mother

It’s hard to accept yourself as someone you don’t desire / As someone you don’t want to be.

Laura Marling

accepting-yourself want desire