Rodney Crowell Quotes

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

You can tell an honest artist from one who's just given all their songs.

I think one of the reasons I've had success in hip-hop is that I can bring out vulnerability in people who are generally seen as tough guys. To me, when a hip-hop musician always plays tough, I find it annoying because I know they're not really like that - there's something deeper and vulnerable. There has to be, because they're human beings.

I like to write about the things I care about. It's no fun to sing about things you don't like.

If it doesn't come from your heart, music just doesn't work.

You can't mass produce somebody's heart and soul. It's a very delicate thing.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.

If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.

The music that I make is pretty sincere; it's from my heart and I love it, and what just happened is more people have started to connect with my heart, and I haven't followed some kind of marketing scheme.

I want to relate. I don't want to just rap and go to the next album.

I tend to write a lot of love songs, but I always want there to be something real and authentic that people can connect to, and I want to not just do it in a stereotypical way.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

Regardless of theology or however you see life or relate to worshiping God, as an artist, my job is to tell the truth and then try to connect with these characters and people as honestly and deeply as possible.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Self-expression is my goal, I want to be real with my feelings. Singing and dancing and all the joy that goes with performing come from my heart. If I can't feel it, I won't do it.

You can't really just think, "Oh, I want to make something that is going to appeal to every single person in the world." You have to just try to make a movie that comes from your heart.

I approach everything the same. I try to make it as real as possible, whether you gotta make people laugh or make people cry, it's always the same approach for me. But if I start doing pratfalls, somebody please pull the plug on me.

...uncorny, human sized drama

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

A sermon is no sermon in which I cannot hear the heartbeat.

I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.

if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns or expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression; but words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring.