Ryan Adams Quotes

People sort of imagine Chris Morris and me sitting somewhere dark, with dripping taps and chilling background music. In fact, we like to sit on his roof in the sunshine - and there's an endless amount of just sitting there, going, 'So, erm, er, what shall we do?'

My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.

For most people, creativity is a serious business. They forget the telling phrase 'the play of ideas' and think that they need to knuckle down and work more. Often, the reverse is true. They need to play.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up with a song in my head, and I have to finish it so I can fall back asleep.

I've got so many melodies in my head.

I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 A.M., and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly, I actually had better ideas.

Many people say some of their best ideas come from dreams. Arguably the greatest Beatles song, 'Yesterday,' came to Paul McCartney in a dream.

I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper'. The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face.

I get all my good ideas sort of at one o' clock in the morning, and I tried for a while to behave like normal people.

One of the things meditation gives you is creativity because creativity really comes from the subconscious brain - intuition, imagination - so it's not like you can go there and say, I'm going to go be creative now. Maybe you can, but the real way you get creativity is, you know, you're taking a hot shower and great ideas come to you from the subconscious. Essentially, meditation opens a pipeline between the conscious and the subconscious.

Sleeping is the height of genius

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

I usually dream of melodies. When I wake up I have them in my head. I usually come up with things in the middle of the night because that's when my mind is the quietest. I always have my tape recorder, pen and pad by my bed just in case.

When I'm on a plane, I am the annoying person humming into my phone. Sitting there static with nothing to do, a lot of melodies come to me. So I've written a lot of songs on planes.

I consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.

Everybody has ideas. The vital question is, what do you do with them? My rock musician sons shape their ideas into music. My sister takes her ideas and fashions them into poems. My brother uses his ideas to help him understand science. I take my ideas and turn them into stories.

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.

Sometimes I can't sleep 'cause I can't get a melody or a beat out my head, so I just have to wake up and, like, record it on a voice note.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

Imagination is the air of mind.

Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.