Quotes About Inspiration

Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.

In summer, I like to sit and compose on the porch, where I can see people come and go.

Ultimately, my goal is to inspire little brown girls that look like me, that are sitting on the porch wearing cornrows.

When I was 12 I worked with someone - it was actually an English teacher at my school, John Woodward. He was the only teacher in the school to have a top-of-the-range Porsche and all the trappings of success, so it was very interesting for me to find out how he did it. He was probably the wealthiest English teacher in the community.

I would love to make a film in the outback or in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. I know that it's not in Australia, but it's not too far.

The bottom line is music, for me, is an exhaust port for life, and if I have a chaotic year, then I'm gonna write a chaotic record, and that's what happened with 'Ziltoid,' with 'Z2.'

We're really lucky because we have a portable studio, which enables us to work wherever we like. There is some extra work involved in setting everything up, but you can find a lot of magic and inspiration in being free to go somewhere completely different.

I'm like a gypsy. I've got a place in Beijing, a place in New York, a place in west Africa; I'm working on a place in Colombia. I like the fact that painting is portable - and I've wanted my entire life to be able to see the world, to respond to it, and make that my life's work.

The Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world... From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture.

None who has passed through the portals of UAA has been a failure. From the former Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, to Lakshmi, Cho, Nagesh, Moulee, Srikanth, ARS and I, all have been a part of UAA.

The guys I dreamt of being like Phil Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, John Goodman, those are the guys I was aiming to become, and I think they do have a diversified portfolio with what they do.

I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation.

I love Sanjeev Kumar's cop portion in 'Sholay.' Manoj Bajpayee in 'Shool' was also amazing.

You have to give every portion of yourself to it. As an artist, that is just what you do - because we love it - we were born to do it.

People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.

I got a job with a law firm in Portland after a couple of years with Senator Muskie. But by then, my interest in politics had been sparked, through meeting Senator Muskie, through seeing what he did.

Not only are Christians writing about Jesus, but also Communists, Jews, atheists and agnostics are taking up their pens to paint a portrait of Jesus.

I like Jaco Pastorius' 'Portrait of Tracy.' He was this bass player who played jazz fusion. He was the dopest bass player who ever lived.

Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play 'Portrait of Tracy.' It's one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

In the beginning, I started doing portraits of children, and of course, children have large eyes. For some reason, they just started getting bigger and bigger. Then, when I started painting imaginary children rather than real ones, they became bigger still.

As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.

I've done 44 portraits of Obama because he's the 44th president.

I definitely am drawn to strong females who are successful, smart women because I am a woman like that. I think it's important to portray those kinds of women on film and television.