Adam Duritz Quotations

For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.

My life isn't necessarily more important than anyone else's: I'm just better in talking about it.

There just is exponentially more money in the movie business than in the music business. As a result there are more people involved in the creative process.

But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.

Truth is, you make albums, and some of those songs are hits, and some of the greatest hits albums have songs that weren't hits. You have a career, the reason why we're still around 10 years is that we do have successful songs.

I'm so excited and proud of this album, ... but it was so f-----g amazingly hard. Every record is a new experience.

I think the biggest, saddest thing that happens in our lives is that we just don't embrace the things that could make it better because they don't seem to make it better at any given moment or we can't decide how to get across the aisle to that person.

It's impossible having five, six, seven people in a room being creative together and not fight, because you want to fight. It's the only way creativity works, if you all put your ideas in.

Losing fights, or even winning fights, can be heartbreaking, and you can throw that away, but the truth is that it does make our lives better.

There's people who think what they need and what they deserve in their lives is a lot worse than what they actually do, so they get themselves involved in things that are needlessly painful: brutal relationships, abusive relationships.

You don't understand what makes you understand what makes your life better until you take something that makes it so much worse and you embrace that.

I find that truly heartbreaking that, like, it's such a common, constant thing in people's lives - a brutal abuse of people by other people, and it's just accepted.

Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that's part of my mental illness, social anxiety. Closeness to other people is really hard, but it's also a shame because it's all you want too. But it doesn't always work.

When you're young and you play music, you have a peer group, you come out of a scene. There's a lot of people you know, and then you have some success, and it all goes away.

Being in a band is about making the band the priority.

I have a lot of problems understanding connections between people and how to negotiate that. It makes everything hard offstage.

I think I'd been limiting myself in some ways just writing in first person all the time.

We waste a lot of our lives sometimes. There are people sitting across from us who would make the whole world better if we spent more time with them in it, but we can't get across that gully.

I'm not a spiritual person at all, but I do think that the world doesn't have to be as lonely as it is.

I feel like I've been in love, but I have stood aside from it over and over again in my life. It's all you want, but it's terrifying.

You have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you're in a group of people that you work with. It's not so much, do they make you feel good when you're around them all the time; it's how can you make everyone feel comfortable together.

I'm so busy trying to breathe through the pain that I'm breathing through the pain of being with people, and that is no way to spend a life. Eventually, they'll just go away, because you will make them sad. That's something I've proven quite adept at doing over the years.

If you want to really love someone, you've got to let go and loosen up and just care.

Bravery is what you can do in the face of things that hurt and scare you, but you do it anyway.

I'm really good in pain. I snapped my leg in half on stage and played a whole show. But I can't sit there with someone that loves me.

I'm really good in a crisis, because I don't panic.

You want to embrace, but I can't figure out how to hold on to it.

When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It's really, like, physically painful, and it's a brand of crazy I don't appreciate having.

When so much money is involved in these movies, someone somewhere is going to try to screw you.

Got no place to go, but there's a girl waitin' for me down in Mexico. She got a bottle of tequila, a bottle of gin, and if I bring a little music, I could fit right in...

It's always music first, or melody and words together, but never words first.

Time and time again I can't please myself.

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where noone notices the contrast of white on white.

I can't remember all the times I've tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

All my songs are where I am.

People really need to show up early to hear Hollis Brown. They are just an unbelievable live band.

You aren't really writing about what you did; you're writing about how you feel.

For all the things I'm losing I might aswell resign myself to try and make a change.

That's where the songs come from: that's what I'd most want people to understand. What sounds good or looks good, that's nothing. The only worthwhile thing in art is seeing someone else's heart.

People ask me if I have stage fright. I say, "God, no, I'm completely comfortable there. I have rest-of-the-day fright."

If you wrap yourself in daffodils I will wrap myself in pain

A long December and there's reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

Your misery is everyone else's entertainment.

The nice thing about being on stage is it's not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I'm up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.

I've been playing music most of my life.

A lot of life is about how you feel relating to dealing with this person or that person. If this person makes you feel good, then they're a person to be around; if they don't, they're not. Being in a band is different. The group is the more important part, and you have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you're in a group of people that you work with.

I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow.

I think that, often, the people who can make you happy are right there, and having them in your life would make your life better, but you can't see how to do it.

If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame.

There is nothing more important you can ever do for this world than to wake up and be a part of it.

I've spent most of my life living in cities where people are obsessed with looking down on people from everywhere else. You get so used to doing it that you start to believe it's simply what everyone does. It makes for an atmosphere of unwelcome that penetrates much of our modern life. It's a shame really because a couple days in Oklahoma will open your eyes to how much better it would be if the rest of the country was filled with a few more people from Oklahoma.

Things are brewing. We will, in all likelihood, be seeing you soon. We may even see the inside of a studio soon. Things are stirring. It may even be possible to get me out of my house. Kicking and screaming and being dragged ... but out.

Still, I never do take the time to recognize the good stuff so thanks for reminding me. And thanks for everything else too.

Art is just an expression, it's something you do because you need to express yourself. You take what's going on on the inside and put it on the outside, that's just who you are. I just write songs because I feel a certain way. When you've got a bunch of them, that's an album. They're all different.

In L.A., I'm a normal popular guy -- that's what I always liked about being famous. I can still go to the grocery store without being accosted. Back then, the world speeded up to me.

In LA, and also on tour, I've been isolated for too long. On stage you're the man, but other than that, there's nothing I like about being on tour. Thousands of people that worship you are nothing, compared to one evening with your friends. But it's my job: I'm a grown-up man, and I go to work.

I know I have to stop reading the message board. I want to read it so I can answer your questions but you people are all insane. Well, at least some of you.

I didn't know what was going on. That's when I realized that everything had gone through the roof. I can't tell you how scary that was.

I can write good songs. I can sing 'em, and I mean it, I mean it deeply, and I pour everything into that. Other than that, I suck.