Ryan Adams Quotes

It's still difficult for me to watch my work.

The thing with 'Lost Without You' is that for a long time I didn't feel like I could share it with people. When it came to releasing it, it was a cliff-diving moment.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

You know sometimes I just want to curl up on stage and lie there for a while - it's weird.

I internalize everything, keep everything inside. I'm not used to spilling my guts, and when you have to do that on film to make a point, it's hard. It's rough. I don't think it's as easy as people think.

You can't be the vulnerable, transparent, raw person required to be an artist, and then cover that stuff up and meet the world with some kind of armor on. It just doesn't go.

I learned a long time ago from David Mamet to wipe your feet at the door, get it out on stage and then go about your life.

There have been times when I'm writing about things that are personally embarrassing. Like any human being, sometimes I can't help but wonder - 'What are the people I know going to think about this?' So I have to remind myself that all is permissible. Art has to be a free space. Language has to be a free space.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

Music is my way out. I keep things locked up and never say anything. I guess in order to say something to one person, I have to sing it to a couple of thousand. It doesn't make for healthy relationships.

I wrote songs when I was little, and I wrote a journal, but I don't think I knew how to let that truth come out yet.

Trust is not very easy for me at all. I want to be a trusting person, but I've been bruised so many times - not to sound woe-is-me about my life.

When it comes down to the song writing, I'm just very slow - very slow. Because the songs are about my life, so I'm doing emotional work on myself.

I think that I can't help but put my personal pain in my music because there's a lot of it. That's my therapy.

You can't write about a personal struggle if you're going to water it down to meet everyone's expectations about what's appropriate.

I don’t have a problem baring my emotions in music. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to have music in my life. I’m pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

Before I started writing my album, I didn't tell people many things. But because I'm going to the studio every day and telling strangers my deepest and darkest emotions, it's made me more of an open book. I wear my heart on my sleeve a lot more now than I did.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

This might end up in crying. If you're not prepared to cry about it, I'm not sure you're making art. And if you're not prepared to dance in anticipation, you're definitely not making art.

I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And it isn't vague, it strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.

Emotionally, it was the hardest 33 days of my life, but it was worth it because the result is that this album is 100 percent me. It’s heartfelt, real, bold, honest, vulnerable, hopeful, strong, poetic, bluesy, gritty, pretty, and simple.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.