Quotes About Artistry

I think Taylor Swift, in the days when she was kind of doing more country style, definitely was a big inspiration for me.

I try to stay away from talking about boys all the time. You can go to Taylor Swift to hear that.

People were like, 'he's collaborating with Taylor Swift' and I was like, 'I am?' I think she's wonderful. Her songwriting has inspired me for years.

Taylor Swift is just dope. She is an ill songwriter.

Taylor Swift - I don't ever hear anything of hers where I'm like, 'Oh, so-and-so could've cut that.'

When I write music, I know a lot of artists like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran tend to write from personal experience. I write from personal experience, of course, but I don't limit myself to that.

Some people are just gifted with a great voice, other people are gifted with great emotion, other people are gifted with great engagement - when you find all of those things in one package, you have Taylor Swift.

Honestly, I don't really hear the comparisons to Taylor Swift anymore. I think it's because people are finally starting to see me for who I am and my craft and not being the next Taylor.

Item numbers are not my cup of tea.

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.

I love Ray Charles. He can still teach everybody a lot about how to make great music. Not necessarily how to make hits, but how to make great music. Of course, part of it is his incredible talent. Who are the greatest jazz singers in the world? Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Ray Charles.

You cannot teach a person how to write songs. It's about being your own person and following your instincts.

People have used my songs and guitar style to teach guitar for a long time.

Nobody taught Picasso how to paint - he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can't learn what's right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you.

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

I come from classical theater training and when I went to college it was a bunch of kids that were hand-picked from around the world. I was around such brilliant young minds and incredible artists with incredible teachers.

My finding of myself as an artist, which I think in itself helped me to find just who I am and how I want to express myself, is entirely - in conjunction, of course, with my family, particularly my mom - founded on teachers.

Conducting is a strange thing to teach. There are very few great conducting teachers, and most great conductors don't teach. Look at Valery Gergiev - what he does is not teachable. A lot of it is on-the-job training, what works and what doesn't work.

I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.

If you love dance and you have the gift of teaching, teaching is super amazing and important because my teachers planted that seed in me. As a teacher you understand the difference or the definition of a Baryshnikov or a Gregory Hines, so teaching is really important and very necessary.

The main thing in making your own music is that it's an expression of someone's personality and being. That's what people want to hear, and you can't really teach that - that's just something that comes out. Teaching just hones that.

Mr. Balanchine wanted me to be myself. He didn't want me to look like anyone else. I love teaching our company dancers the Balanchine ballets. I try to give them what was passed down to me and what I learned from him. They dance it so beautifully. It also keeps me close to Mr. Balanchine. He's with me every single day.

I have to be my own artist. I need the world to know who I am, especially for music. When it comes to acting, that is a whole other story. I have no complaints; that's a team effort. It's not just me, it's everyone. But when it comes to music, it is solo; that's all me.

I've always thought of the process of creating ballets as being this kind of team effort. It's not like being a painter, where you have your paint, and you have canvas, and you just go at it. I'm working with these living, breathing, functioning human beings, and they have their own thoughts and ideas about what works well movement-wise.