Quotes About Artistry

Don't try to guess what it is people want and give it to them. Don't ask for a show of hands. Try your best to write what you like, what you think your friends would like and what you think your father would like and then cross your fingers... The most valuable thing you have is your own voice.

Although I have guitars all around, and I pick them up occasionally and write a tune and make a record, I don't really see myself as a musician. It may seem a funny thing to say. It's just like, I write lyrics, and I make up songs, but I'm not a great lyricist or songwriter or producer. It's when you put all these things together - that makes me.

I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing.

Miller didn't write Death of a Salesman. He released it. It was there inside him, waiting to be turned loose. That's the measure of its merit.

I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

I first write melodies that will make people shiver, and then, I add the lyrics.

The best songs I write in 20 minutes.

I'm just going to sing my music; I'm going to write my songs, and I think that people get to know me in that sense.

Mike is the craziest person. He's scattered; he's all over the place. When you hold him down and tell him, 'This is what you're doing,' he's fantastic. But you have to hold him down. Like, when he had to write his verse for 'Hello Nasty,' we had to take his phone away to get him to do it.

I normally work like a vampire. Around 8 to 9 P.M., what I call 'the spirits' actually show up, and then I just go in the booth and scream on top of a track. I only sing on the mic. I don't sit down and write anything.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

All the films I do, I write the scripts, I direct.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I don't write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

I don't think that there's much that sets me apart from other musicians, but I think there are definitely things that set me apart from other kinds of artists. I feel that musicians do it their own way, write their own songs and put on a great live shows.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

I write heavily under the influence of James Taylor.

I have a high range. Sometimes I sound like Stevie Winwood. Some people say I sound like Peter Gabriel. Some of the songs I write are funky. Others are slow. Some are ponderous, and some are there to shock. I must say some are pretty damn good, too.

If you look at somebody like Bach, he didn't need collaborators to write for keyboards, cello, violin or anything else. I feel the same way about my music. The times that I have worked with other people, I've been very unhappy with the results.

I play in a band, I write songs, I sing, you know, perform on stage.

You can only write your own vision.

I've made sure that in any situation and with any record label, I'm allowed to write my own music.

I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'