Quotes About Artistry

For a man it's not easy to play a woman onscreen. You have to wax your body. You dress up a lot to be able to do justice to the portrayal.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.

When I make a film, I am hoping to reinvent the genre a little bit. I just do it my way. I make my own little Quentin versions of them... I consider myself a student of cinema. It's almost like I am going for my professorship in cinema, and the day I die is the day I graduate. It is a lifelong study.

You gotta stick your neck out and put out a record that isn't safe... that's the Green Day way!

I know I haven't always done things the right way. I'm just trying to reflect on how to make myself better, how to become a better man, a better father, a better person, a better artist.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

When I was younger, I'd be walking down the street and suddenly panic because I had a cool idea and no way of getting it down - I'd have to sing it all the way home. Now I can hum it into my phone.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I read in an interview with Lil Wayne that he recorded a mixtape of something like 50 straight minutes of him rapping all of his material because he felt like he could never move on to the next phase of his musical exploration if he didn't get it down on tape.

Wayne and Drake, it takes them so long to do a song. I understand why, because they want it to be perfect. But I think I can do a perfect song in 10 minutes.

You can say that Wayne Coyne sounds like Neil Young.

My favorite rappers are, I can't really say. I like Kanye because he's so creative. He'll just do anything. I like what Kanye's bringing to the game. Lil Wayne. I like Wayne.

With Fountains Of Wayne, I almost always start with lyrics - maybe not the entire lyric, but I almost always need a couplet or something, and then I work from there. With Ivy, it's much more about the atmosphere and the vibe.

I rap on 'Front Porch Junkies' and 'Whatcha Got in that Cup.' I try to channel my inner Lil Wayne and Drake. It's fun to be able to freestyle over a country melody and say country words over a rap song.

I would love to do a collaboration with Lil' Wayne. I would have loved to sing on his song, 'How To Love.' I wanted to do the remix to that song really bad.

The people we grew up watching and listening to - Outkast, Gucci Mane, Hot Boys, Lil Wayne, Master P - all that type of stuff, we took those styles and made it our own.

Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work.

As a musician, your instrument is almost predetermined. I had played drums, piano, clarinet, but when I heard Wayne Shorter play the saxophone, I knew that sound is what I wanted.

I listened to Lil Wayne a lot when I was kid.

I bark my voice out through a closed throat, pretty much. It's more, perhaps, like a dog in some ways. It does have its limitations, but I'm learning different ways to keep it alive.

My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I'm still a virgin in a lot of ways. I'm not used to being shot down for no reason.

I want people to really recognize that this is what I am naturally good at: I'm really good at making music and describing your feelings vicariously through my experiences, through my past and my future. I want people to relate to me in multiple ways and be versatile in my music.

The great thing about being a musician today is that you can explore your creativity in multiple ways without compromising your primary focus.

In certain ways it is incredibly damaging considering the stuff I did before certainly wasn't for kids.