Quotes About Artistry

The more I'm dedicated to this work, the more I'm able to satisfy my deep need to create. And that's a pretty good thing. If you take half-decent care of yourself, that can propel you on into productive later years.

People said making clothes inside out was not proper. I disagreed, because clothes that are inside out are as beautiful as a cathedral.

I'm working on a proper rock record, a good, old-school rock record. Finally.

I'm not a manufactured artist. Nobody taught me how to be a proper artist.

To finally be able to actually play the piano with vocalists and actually do, like, a proper concert - that feels really good.

When we were writing the 'Stage' album, we realized we'd never really done proper covers, where we were taking songs and making them our own and kind of playing around with them. I came up with the idea of doing a cover of 'Wish You Were Here,' but we didn't really want it on the record.

I don't care about the rules. In fact, if I don't break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I'm not doing my job properly.

Sheer brilliance needs to be expressed properly.

Artists have to be represented properly and paid properly.

I've always liked my clothes, even before I could properly afford them. Clothes for me were never a cloak, a cover. They were how I chose to express myself.

As long as it's good music. I love all music. It's got to be constructed properly.

I got into cello in the fourth grade, and I played that for years. I adored playing it. I got an opera coach when I was 12 because I really wanted to learn how to sing properly. The only proper way to sing, I thought at that age, was opera.

I came to Nashville in the early '90s, and I thought, 'OK, enough is enough. I write songs; I just don't have the backbone to show it to anybody. I want to go to Nashville and learn how to properly write a song.'

Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.

Even at my biggest, I want to be writing for other artists. Even at my peak - the highest I can be as an artist - I always want to be keeping my creative juices flowing, keeping money in the bank, putting my intellectual property out there.

Our first name was the Poetical Prophets before we changed it to Mobb Deep, and when I look back on it now, that was, like, a ill name for us because that is what we really were.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.

I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.

If you wrote a crummy line or maybe didn't sing to the best of your ability, there's layers of 10 different instruments all working to convey something. In writing prose for the memoir, if it's not working, it's just not working. It's harder to figure out how to fix it.

We've got to find a way to protect the process of making musical theater.