Quotes About Artistry

There were a lot of really special moments for me. When I first sang 'Fix You' by Coldplay, that was one. I love that song so much, and I love Coldplay, and I love what the song meant.

Thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise.

I'm not a Barbie doll, I'm just a multidimensional human being who likes to make things.

I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it.

Who am I, if I'm not this singer with big high notes? I identify with my voice. But I'm more than just the acrobatics.

It's certain rappers that can really rap, that really spit all bars, so I understand why someone would say, 'You not a real rapper.' But the main thing is, if you can make good songs, who cares? So I don't know why guys be tripping on Drake. He makes great music. He's dope.

There's times, in certain songs, that I might be in my own world, and who cares about who's out there, you know? You have a job to do, so you do that job of singing that song or telling that story because that's what you're doing.

What I really care about is writing... Some people feel about touring the way I feel about writing, which is, 'Whoa, I can't believe I get to do this as a job.'

I think, in the middle of the '90s, I made a couple of records where I tried to figure out what I thought the radio wanted from me. They weren't my best records by any stretch of the imagination. It didn't take me too long to figure out, 'Whoa, back up, dude. Just go back to following your heart, and it will all be OK.'

You can be whoever you want to be when you are writing songs.

Whenever I am making stuff, I got a thing in the back of my mind: 'Oh, this would be so perfect for' whoever.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

The people who go get an LL album want to hear LL. They don't want to hear LL trying to sound like DMX or whoever else is out there. That's not what they want to hear from me, because if they want to hear that they can go get the real thing.

And, you know, I think the original recording of Ravel's Bolero, probably whoever played percussion on that, will never have It played better than that.

If you say, 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it,' well, then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record, I'm just going to cut the things that I like, and whoever likes it, likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.

A lot of big whoever producers, they come with a song and they say, 'Sing this,' and I'm not that girl.

I knew I wanted to do music at eight years of age. I listened to a lot of Motown growing up, and it got to the point where I started mimicking people - Michael Jackson or whoever. People started to notice I could hold a tone. The bug was always there.

Separation is very important to me. I don't strive to be a celebrity. My music has nothing to do with me at the end of the day. Once it's made and it's purchased, it belongs to whoever.

I'm a creative person, and I'm gonna be creative, so whoever's upset because of that, that's too bad.

I'm aware that I have a career. But, if I was the hottest in the game, songs all over the radio - let's say whoever produced made me super big. Like, that would be cool, but there would be something in me that goes, 'You only wrote the raps. You didn't make the beats. You didn't direct. You didn't do all that.'

Whoever my films are about, they'll hopefully still have my sensibility, whatever that is.

I've never seen Key think about how he was going to act on a song. He just is whoever he is that day.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.