Ryan Ross Quotes

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

I never played music, but it's an important thing ... the studying, the inspiration.

I'm very inspired by past music.

Stevie Wonder was a big influence in my life.

My greatest influence is Jimi Hendrix, and if he's been reincarnated, or if he's looking down, sideways, or looking up, I just wanted to tell him that I love him and thank him for opening doors for me. I just wanted to make it beautiful for him.

Statistically, Portland, Oregon has the most street kids, like kids that run away from home and live on the street. It's like a whole culture thing there. If you walk around on the streets, there are kids living on the streets, begging for money, but it's almost like a cool thing. They all just sit around and play music and squat.

I just hope that our fans are people who are inspired by music, and just use our music as a background or inspiration for whatever it is they do.

I've always listened to music while I write, but none of my work has been so directly impacted by a song as my new novel, 'So Cold the River,' for which the brilliant strings piece 'Short Trip Home,' composed by Edgar Meyer and featuring the incredible Joshua Bell on violin, inspired much of the story.

I've admired Alicia Keys since before I got into the music industry, just everything she represents as a female artist.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.

Still, to this day I go back and listen to music that inspires me to write now.

For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.

Music is an art form too. Sometimes other forms of art can be inspiring to the musician.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

No city in Italy contains so many miserable beggars, and no town in the world so many blind.

Where else can a guy like me make it? Blind and poor---only in America.

One day I heard Ray Charles on the radio and I found out he was blind. I thought, 'You know what, if there's room for Ray, there might be room for Jose.'

A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.

I think 'Dark Blue' came to me while I was doing a project in London. I read it, and the character immediately popped out at me.

Maybe if you see me begging on the streets, you might find me doing The Stone Roses the next day.

In college, I would follow Bob Dylan around, and I would show up to a concert, and he would sing some song he hadn't sang in a long time, and it would speak to something, and I would think it had some great fateful implication.

My dad played a little bit of piano and guitar, but not that professionally. I saw him play, and I said, 'I want to play. I want to try this instrument.'