Rosanne Cash Quotes

There's always that moment when you realize what it's going to be. You might have an overarching theme and you need to fill in the blanks - and then there's this "Aha" moment when you see where it's going. That's the most satisfying part of writing.

As John Adams said, all democracies will eventually self-destruct. We seem to be doing it very quickly.

You stand in front of a great painting and your heart just opens and your mind expands about what's possible. That, to me, is a connection to what God is.

I have been so struck by the mettle of the men who founded this country and wrote the Constitution. What unbelievable persistence and integrity. I wonder if any of us would have the attention span required to forge a whole new world. I wish we did.

And I kind of said to myself if I get my voice back I'm not going to take back the old anxiety about it and just focus on the limitations. I'm really going to enjoy it.

The key to change... is to let go of fear,

I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating, really fun.

I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians.

It was never too late to undo who you had become.

I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer.

I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children.

The ephemeral nature of live performance is the part I love most - it's a monk's sand painting, carefully constructed, then wiped away in an instant.

I love mixing up my genres.

Being in Vietnam changed him [Johnny Cash] fundamentally. He was devastated when we went into Iraq.

We talk about your drinking
But not about your thirst
You set off through the minefield
Like you were rounding first

I wanted to be a songwriter.I didn't so much want to be a performer.I more grew into that just from being a songwriter.

Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.

We are creating a culture where content creators are a new servant class, and paid as such.

When I was eleven I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn't come true, I stopped talking to people who didn't listen, I lost hope and I retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the Outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself; my own peculiar jewels under lock and key.

The thing that scares me most is the shift from serving the people to exercising power and with it, this attendant narcissism. Sarah Palin is a great example of someone that just stirs the pot for the sake of the attention.

Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.

My dad [Johnny Cash] went to the [Richard] Nixon White House and refused to sing "Welfare Cadillac" (instead performing the anti-war songs "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Man in Black"). He protested the Vietnam War, but he went to perform for the troops with bombs dropping all around him. He had that kind of genius: a true artist's capacity for holding two opposing thoughts at once while being large enough to encompass all realities.

Once your kids get older and get out of the house, it's not like it stops. They're on the phone with me every day; I'm intimately involved in their problems.

While visiting places in the South with my heart really open, I realized how important people in certain geographical spots were to me, what they symbolize, how I'm still connected to them and how much they are a part of my ancestry, both musical and real.

I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.

If you're playing in a tradition and you have no reference point to it, no understanding and have not studied it, I can't respect that.

If Mr. [V.S.] Naipaul takes no pleasure in the happy delineation of the varieties of human nature, then he must be intolerably stupid.

My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.

For the first time in 23 years I'm enjoying the process of supporting it, of going out and doing shows, and doing the interviews, and doing everything.

"Country" has become a marketing term, but I see myself as a songwriter.

I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing.

I think that my sensitivity to music has actually deepened and expanded as I've gotten older. You add more life experience.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

Documenting one's life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit.

With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant.

I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.

I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.

I choose not to give energy to the emotions of revenge, hatred or the desire to subjugate.

Music is service to people. Music and art - we need it like blood and oxygen. It heals us, and it reveals us to ourselves.

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.

Southern gentility is evocative to me.

If I ignore my work, I start having anxiety attacks.

I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

The religion I have is music. Even the times I have headaches, when I'm singing, I can't feel them. My dad used to say that, too, especially near the end of his life. He would be in pain - a lot of pain - and he said the only time when he didn't feel pain was when he performed and sang.

Yeah, I was in the phase for the last ten years or so where every record I made I said OK, that's the last one, I don't want to record anymore, I don't want to do this any more, I don't want to have a public life.

I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10, 20, 30, 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.

I was angry at my parents when I had to have brain surgery, that they weren't still around, because no matter how old you are you want you parents when you're going through something like that.

It's a little dangerous for me to get outside myself and think about how I want people to see me.

When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming.

I think any young person who is going into the same field as their parent whose parent has been very successful, it's complicated.And it was complicated for me.

I have a real worker-bee mentality. Just show up, just do it. Even if you feel like s
t and you think you're terrible and you'll never get better and it will never go anywhere, just show up and do it. And, eventually, something happens.

Sarah Palin is a great example of someone that just stirs the pot for the sake of the attention. No vision, no critical thinking, no backup to her statements. Just to incite little riots everywhere and capitalize upon it financially. To me, she is a microcosm of the ultimate cynicism in American politics.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves.

My record label is treating me like I'm a new artist, which is exciting after all this time.

Well, the first year I lost my voice I didn't mind so much because I was going to have a baby and I was distracted with him anyway, I didn't even think about it that much, well, OK, this is what's happening.

I don't do comparisons because I always lose.