Lola Kirke Quotations

We have this idea of artists being on the fringe and being debauched and strange. I don't think that people who commit themselves to classical arts should be exempt from that.

The oboe is the most maddening thing of all time. I'm struggling to play something that my oboe teacher was doing when she was much younger than I am.

The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. It was something that I didn't have the most fun associations around. A lot of people don't - they think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis.

I will never be good at the oboe. No matter what happens, I will never be good at it because I just don't have that much time on my hands. I don't have the gift of going back to being a child and having my brain develop around this instrument.

As somebody who has wanted to be an actor who is very young, I can relate to somebody who has been practicing oboe five days a week since they were very young. The physicality of anything a character does is a tremendous gift.

I'm practicing the oboe. But I don't play. Just single notes, not an entire piece of music.

I think the merging of high and low culture is so fascinating.

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

You perform the thing that you made, that's inside of you, and to subject that to any kind of scrutiny is terrifying. It's still terrifying to me.

Even though I was performing all the time as an actress and I was doing all of these plays as a kid, there's a vulnerability about being a musician that you don't get [when] you perform somebody else's work.