Ryan Adams Quotes

I'm just trying to get the best sound and have it be consistent and make sense with what I'm going through in my life.

My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.

The work that I feel is most authentically mine is the one that is my first reaction, the first thing that feels like the truth. In aggregate, those choices, those series of decisions, create your point of view, your visual language.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

For me, the most effective cabaret evenings have been some of the most personal ones, where the performer is comfortable enough to simply be themselves.

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

I can't remove the autobiographical slant from the things I write. You always bring yourself into what you're writing.

When you're an artist, you can't write with the intent of affecting anyone.

You can only really sing about what you know; at least, I can.

I've done bits of writing for other people but when I'm writing music as Years & Years, I'm using my life and my stories and my experiences. I want it to be authentic and real but also to work as a pop song - I never want to just put in a cheesy line.

I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.

I do not correct my first imaginings by my second--well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

I was never trying to be the voice for anybody else. I was just trying to sing about what I was going through, and was singing about those things specifically because I knew there was an audience not being served.

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

We tell the stories that we want to tell.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.

Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.

I'm interested in taking things from my relationship that I don't see on screen - or that I feel like that could be useful or helpful if it were out in the open - and trying to put that in the movies as much as possible.

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.