Quotes About Artistry

Raphael Saadiq said to me, quite often, that Chuck D was his history teacher. And so he got a lot from the music, things that he wasn't getting maybe in school. And I feel the same way with regards to Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder.

Everyone knows Earth, Wind & Fire. We know 'September,' all the big sort of hits from going out and dancing and stuff. When I was developing St. Lucia, I really started listening a little bit deeper, listening back to their stuff from the '70s and '80s, and really dug into it.

When I'm at home creating music, I usually wind up laughing. It's always, like, funny - like, what the hell did I just write?

I call Earth, Wind & Fire my day job and my solo career my night gig.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

I've been making films since the '70s and trying to develop that best possible fiction-film style that I feel is the most expressive. At a certain point, I felt I was winding up making the same film stylistically and I found that boring.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

I don't think there's anything that will make me stop doing it. There may be a time when it's not available to anyone. You may have to come listen at my basement window... but I can't stop.

I'm not sure I know how to make music anymore. Maybe you're given a window into things for a time, and beyond that maybe it goes away. Why should you expect it to stay?

My job as an actor is to cover and expose in varying allowance that - so that the audience can peek through the window to the people I create.

The curse of being a songwriter is that's you're always at work. I could look out the window right now and see something that would make me want to write.

When you listen to early Leonard Cohen records or Joni Mitchell records, you feel like a window is being opened into someone's life.

My personal feeling is that ultra-high frame rates and ultra-vivid giant screen movies can be like a window onto reality. And if you recognize it as such, you can write your screenplay, direct your movie, edit it, and present it as a live experience - not like a movie.

Performance was a shock to me. The first time I remember feeling I could do it was during the making of my first video, 'Fun for Me.' I couldn't sleep the night before the shoot, I was so frightened. I had to play a ghost and a piece of merchandise in a shop window, and I had no idea whether I was going to be able to pull it off.

My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.

Ursula Nordstrom was famous for finding artists in unlikely places. Maurice Sendak was a window designer, and she just came across one of his windows. Everyone was looking to find a talent.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Acting, like wine, gets better as time goes on. Singing gets better after a certain age. The dancer peaks at 35 or 40.

So I figured in keeping with the record, I'd do something off the wall which is show up for free and wing it... I don't know, I'm just going to play some songs. I think it'll be fun.

When I got back from London, I started with a new voice teacher in the experimental wing, who trained me to have my own artistry as opposed to forcing a technique upon me.

I feel like I grow wings on stage.

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

When you get to the end of a TV series, you feel totally out of sorts as an actor. You feel unfit; your voice box has collapsed on you because you've spent all day muttering into a microphone that's two inches from your head, and you feel desperate to spread your wings and do a bit of real thesping.

Theatre gives you wings as an actor.