Rosanne Cash Quotes

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.

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

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

When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song. We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said I don't know that one either, Dad, and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy.

The new record started out being about loss, but it's morphed into being about how relationships go on even though one person is not in a body anymore.

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

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.

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 do not believe in terrorism, violence, destruction, murder, pre-emption, or War.

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.

Because I was starting out in my 20's. I wanted to do it on my own. I didn't want to use my dad or have people say I was using him.

I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for the first few months after the brain surgery, because they were too complex and disturbing. So I listened to a lot of classical music. I didn't really want to read, either, so I listened to books on tape or watched movies. I also re-taught myself all of my childhood piano pieces. It helped me repair my brain.

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 adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.

Like Thornton Wilder said, time is not a river, but rather a landscape that you step in and out of. I've always found that true of creative work, and I've heard so many songwriters and writers in general say the same thing... When you're going into the realms of your self and trying to tap into the mystery of this creative source, linear time kind of falls away.

No, my step-daughter just opened a theatre school for children, I have another daughter who works in the record industry and another who is going back to collage and I have two little ones at home.

He [Johnny Cash] was so fragile. We invaded Iraq in March, and he died in September. And because his health was so fragile, he couldn't take the controversy of making a public statement against the war. He knew that people were rabid. They attacked me mercilessly after I did the press conference with Musicians United to Win Without War. He knew that he couldn't tolerate that.

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

The key to change is to let go of fear.

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.

Sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

More and more, I see myself as a folk musician, and someone who values context.

I love mixing up my genres.

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.

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.

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.

Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.

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.

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.

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

If a relationship is founded on love it doesn't end

I spent nearly two hours deciding on an outfit that would look as if the subject of clothing had never crossed my mind, but would in fact show off my best features and miraculously hide the extra pounds.

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.

I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.

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

Isn't that the goal, as you grow older? That you start reclaiming those parts of yourself you didn't recognize or didn't think were there all along? That's what happened when I made The River and the Thread record.

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

Every person's every action has an effect.

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

I was down with Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin-Carpenter. We did an acoustic tour, just the three of us, three chicks and three guitars

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.

Think about all of the families where the father is a doctor and the son is a doctor or generations of coal miners. Why did they go into that line of work? Because that's what they were taught. Or was it in their genes? It's not an either/or question. It's both. I was inclined in that way. I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.

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