Top 60 Ryan Adams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Bad nights lead to better days.”

— Ryan Adams

2. “There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.”

— Ryan Adams

3. “Music is my thing. It’s my thing; it’s what I love. It’s what I do. It’s football to me; it’s Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.”

— Ryan Adams

4. “When You’re young, you get sad, and you get high.”

— Ryan Adams

5. “You could eat sushi off my bookshelf. My cleaning regime is like a battleground. I’m Genghis Khan and my cleaning products are my Mongolian army and I take no prisoners. The rest of my life is an experiment in chaos so I like to keep my flat neat.”

— Ryan Adams

6. “This is going to sound crazy, but I can hear music in my head. I can imagine a piano or a guitar playing, and I can sort of think out...”

— Ryan Adams

7. “A lot of my songs, they’re like puzzle pieces, and there’s just one way to put them together. You could, if you needed to, get the scissors out and cut up things to make them work. But I don’t want to do that.”

— Ryan Adams

8. “For me, a record is valid when I actually hold the vinyl. Like, I’ve worked on the art for a while and I see the vinyl and I go “Ooh, it’s an actual LP. How cool is that?” That’s very sacred to me. You can’t take that back, you know?”

— Ryan Adams

9. “It’s really very easy for me to be in The Cardinals, because I bring my voice, my guitar, and my songs to them, and then we all play around to find out what works.”

— Ryan Adams

10. “Being a rock musician is already like ego-tripping hardcore. You’re self-consumed, and you’re always thinking. It’s really easy to say, “I’m going to write a song about this situation, and when I’m done, everyone will care.” To everybody else, that’s ego-tripping.”

— Ryan Adams

11. “It’s hard to be bipolar and bicoastal at the same time.”

— Ryan Adams

12. “I kiss her mouth and I know... for everything there is a word... for everything but this.”

— Ryan Adams

13. “Can you still have any famous last words if you’re somebody nobody knows?”

— Ryan Adams

14. “Maybe I am a jerk sometimes. Maybe I’m not. I think most people are kind of a jerk once in a while.”

— Ryan Adams

15. “While the things I do kill me, they just tell me to relax.”

— Ryan Adams

16. “When I’m in New York, I just want to walk down the street and feel this thing like I’m in a movie.”

— Ryan Adams

17. “I’ve never been to Vegas, but I’ve gambled all my life.”

— Ryan Adams

18. “They don’t make coats for this kind of cold.”

— Ryan Adams

19. “Part of the joy of music is listening to lots of different kinds of music and learning from it. Specifically for me, I like writing songs that move me, and what moves me are beautiful songs on the piano or the guitar and really, really heavy music.”

— Ryan Adams

20. “I want to make sure I’m with a girl that’s a good kisser, and that when I wake up, I have coffee and a cigarette. That’s all I really want out of life. That, and world domination.”

— Ryan Adams

21. “I use to be panicked, but know I’m curious!”

— Ryan Adams

22. “I can sort of will that stuff to happen to me if I put myself in the right headspace. Then I can actually get to a space where it won’t just be one song that comes through, but a series of them.”

— Ryan Adams

23. “While you can fill every heart as your own full of laughter loud as gold and passion quick as silver.”

— Ryan Adams

24. “Words may move but they’re never moving fast enough.”

— Ryan Adams

25. “I routinely never discuss my marriage. It’s nice to have things in my life that are totally mine.”

— Ryan Adams

26. “Some people want to go forever, I just want to burn off hard and bright.”

— Ryan Adams

27. “Forever only takes its toll on some.”

— Ryan Adams

28. “I think that we live in a time where it’s easier to be suspicious of dedicated men and women, people dedicated to their craft, because the world around them inspires them to be lazy. It inspires them to be negative. It inspires them to be snarky.”

— Ryan Adams

29. “I’m never argumentative for the sake of being argumentative, I don’t think. And more than ever, I’ve had to be willing to fight just to get records released, or just to be able to walk away with a little bit of self-respect and pride.”

— Ryan Adams

30. “I like things that reach a little further and are a little more abstract, but I don’t think that’s what I do naturally well. How I write naturally is probably what’s furthest from me, and the most removed from what I understand.”

— Ryan Adams

31. “The good thing about playing the guitar: You can take on different kinds of music. I’m always doing something different from the last thing I did because I have the shortest attention span on earth.”

— Ryan Adams

32. “I was a nervous young man. I wanted to do so many things. And I was so enthusiastic and earnestly in love with so many things that I tried too hard. I tried really, really hard. And I made a lot of mistakes. I was afraid of a lot of stuff. And I kind of feel bad for that person I was.”

— Ryan Adams

33. “The process of making music is more interesting to me than the end result. If I was a cook, I’d be more interested in cooking food than eating food.”

— Ryan Adams

34. “I don’t think, that all my stuff could’ve been records. Some, maybe. The ones that I really wanted to be records, those are the ones that are going into the box.”

— Ryan Adams

35. “I always have to remember that I am the narrator, but it doesn’t have to be about me. A lot of songwriting is about trying to use what part of me is valid in telling the story. I don’t want to overcook it, you know? Sometimes it seems that’s really where the work is.”

— Ryan Adams

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36. “I think that music, or at least the kind of music that I make, benefits greatly from improvisation.”

— Ryan Adams

37. “On Heartbreaker, I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs.”

— Ryan Adams

38. “Not to discount my music, but I’m always suspicious of the music that I make on some level, as to how valid it is. Or maybe not “valid,” but how important.”

— Ryan Adams

39. “You can imagine several scenes from Star Wars? The way they looked? For me, that’s how music is. Sometimes I’ll be developing riffs for songs, just while I’m sitting around and not playing.”

— Ryan Adams

40. “It sounds like I’m channeling or something, and I don’t really fully understand what it is. I’ll get a piece of paper and write down what I think is coming to me. And I’ll play it once. Whether it’s being recorded or not, I can then usually remember it for a sometimes shocking amount of time.”

— Ryan Adams

41. “I’m actually a pretty upbeat person outside of playing music.”

— Ryan Adams

42. “A lot of the songs I write are like songs that I’ve never been able to find on any record, but that I’ve always wanted to hear. Or maybe in a style I already loved, but I was looking for something in it that I wasn’t hearing yet.”

— Ryan Adams

43. “When I start working on a batch of tunes – like roughly 10 solid tunes – I always know there’ll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there’s another song waiting behind it.”

— Ryan Adams

44. “I’ve gotten to a place where I still love to play and sing, but I don’t have any ego agenda left, outside of just wanting to stay in a creative place and play music. I much prefer to sing for somebody else, and to somebody else.”

— Ryan Adams

45. “That’s why I played music; my social skills were limited. I think a lot of people that experience that pick up guitars, because they can’t communicate otherwise.”

— Ryan Adams

46. “It’s hard to view myself sometimes as even in the same league as other musicians, mainly because there’s so much music before me. I feel overinformed by different styles and different possibilities.”

— Ryan Adams

47. “The night destroys the sun.”

— Ryan Adams

48. “Some things were made to be felt.”

— Ryan Adams

49. “I think it would be wrong to consider ‘Ashes and Fire’ a love album. The record is obsessed with time. I believe that there is a kinder view of the self on this record.”

— Ryan Adams

50. “It would be really nice to make a record that would be super-fun to play live – a record that would be funny, with a little bit of heart.”

— Ryan Adams

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