Ricky Reed Quotes

You'll go mad trying to figure out what people want. I don't bother. I write the stories I want to read.

I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need.

I always try to put something personal on my albums just to give people out there a little piece of my history and how I got where I am and who I am.

When you write a song, you don't ask if it's good or not, or if it's gonna sell. When you write a song, you ask whether you've reached deep inside your heart and whether it's honest.

I wanted to create a body of work that I was proud of. It's come from honesty and integrity, without forcing anything from myself, the ideas had to come instinctively and organically. Whether that translates to people in that way, it's kind of out of my hands now.

I just try to write literally what I love. That's usually the barometer that I use. As trite as it sounds, I'm like, 'what would I want to see? What would I be excited about?'

I have never been able to separate - nor have I wanted to - my personal love and desire for truth, passion, and understanding from my lyrics.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

I'm just excited that I get to put out the music I love versus music just for the sake of it.

There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.

The artists who stand out to me have a passion for what they do. There are a lot of people who can sing. It's just like when you go to church and people are singing because it sounds good, not because it feels good. There's a difference.

I don't care what people do. I don't care how people remember my albums. I do them for my own reasons.

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

Music's supposed to come from the heart. I felt like that if it ever got mechanical, I was going to back away from it.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

I think the key to making records generally is to make 'em for yourself, regardless of the climate in the business.

I really create everything I do from the heart.

I write based on powerful inner impulses, and those seem to shift over time.

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

People ask whether I put the politics first, journalism first or the comedy first; it doesn't really matter. I'm just playing with the cards that I have been dealt because I really love doing what I do.

My purpose is to make a movie to make you warm. To give you some heat. Now, this rational world has become a place where only what is cool is good. Do you cut the movie on the basis of the beat of modernity or the basis of the beat of your own heart?

The way I choose projects is based on what I think is most real and most interesting, not on what's paying the most money or what's most popular.

I try to just make music that I love, and if I believe in it that's all that matters.

I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can't say it came from hard-nosed business analysis... It was just something I really want to see built.