Quotes About Artistry

Stephen Sondheim is calculus for actors. The words are witty and brilliant and profound but complicated.

I say funny stuff in my lyrics to make people laugh, but it's all in the seriousness of the music. I'm just being witty.

When they look back on me I want 'em to remember me not for all my wives, although I've had a few, and certainly not for any mansions or high livin' money I made and spent. I want 'em to remember me simply for my music.

This is just rap. I'm not trying to make people think I'm some sort of scientific wizard or inspirational poet.

I went out of my way to make 'Immortal' sound perfect. 'Immortal,' 'Just What I Am,' and 'King Wizard,' those are perfect beats. Not a lot of people can perform on them. I say that meaning they're tailor-made for me.

But I had two very special people who helped to take my style to the next level. Thank God for my first MC Cowboy and my first student Grand Wizard Theodore, and to go out after creating this art form and finding everyone jamming to it - that too was pretty scary.

I can't imagine how much time it took Matt Bucy to cut up 'The Wizard of Oz' and reassemble every word of dialog into alphabetical order. The resulting movie is called 'Of Oz the Wizard.'

I'm a wizard at poetry.

When I did 'Frankenstein,' the record company said, 'Now you can do 'Dracula' and 'Wolf Man' and we'll call the whole thing Monster Rock!' and I said, 'No, that's not going to happen, I'm not going to do that.' I kind of enjoy defying categorization. I love music in and of itself. I love the beauty of harmony and rhythm.

When I go back to seek inspiration - whether it be from Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, the Beatles, Hank Williams, Ray Charles or Bob Dylan - it's from the performance. Those artists are in the studio playing their instrument and singing. There's no going back and redoing the vocals.

Nobody told me how to sing, so I just thought I'd try and sing like Howlin' Wolf. It was like a bark; there was melody to it - but I would go off a bit and I wouldn't stick AutoTune on it or anything to make it in key. Even now, I couldn't tell you about harmonies. I couldn't tell about what notes I'm singing because nobody taught me to sing.

If a woman's aim is to become a singer, I would highly advise her to first develop her craft in songwriting. It's such a powerful tool to have when you're a singer.

Drag was not only my introduction to womanhood, but my introduction to entertainment. It was the first time I realized that I could move a crowd.

Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.

I have a lot of relatives that were dancers and musicians and artists. They basically came out of the womb doing it.

I've been performing since I came out of the womb. I've been dancing and singing since I was a toddler. Acting seemed like a natural progression from that.

I think I popped out of the womb singing Diana Ross.

I can make music out of anything. Even that phone ringing, I could sample that. I grew up listening to Missy, Britney, Kelis, Lil Kim, Grace Jones, all the eccentric, out-there women. And men like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie. Those are my peopledem.

For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.

The thing that interested me, there are so many filmmakers I admire - like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino - they have these themes where there's not much going on, but they were suspenseful.

There's so many more themes of drag than just fierceness.

I feel that people really feel they've got a part of me when they listen to my albums and the themes just show themselves.

Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.

The idea of the museum is to show my work since the start, and I wanted to show all of it, not just to choose between different pieces. They are grouped together in themes - minimalism, androgyny, black and white, graphic, flowers, and so on - from the earliest designs to the most recent ones.