Quotes About Artistry

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.

The ideology of the Smashing Pumpkins was ultimately more valuable than the music of the Smashing Pumpkins. That's what critics can't put their finger on.

I'm prepared to spend the rest of my life playing clubs, if that means I'm playing music that I believe in.

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.

A good artist is willing to die many times over. What's funny is, I've died so many times.

I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

I would love to work with Paolo Nutini because he is so soulful and an amazing songwriter.

I have to re-create the universe every morning when I wake up and kill it in the evening, which is a bit outrageous, but there you go.

I've always been a fan of the melancholy, like Morrissey. I grew up playing classical nocturnes like Chopin and Debussy on piano, so I write really melancholy lyrics and melodies

The judges say, make it your own, so I just remixed a song if I felt like the piece needed it

We need to show the world in powerful, positive ways that artists devoted to God and to building His kingdom do not work with a cloudy lens or a drab palette, but, on the contrary, they see the world more clearly and colorfully because of His power in their lives.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.

You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do.

The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its collaborative aspect. They were individual efforts—

Great ideas and great melodies have a lot in common.

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

There's a point where you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that you're in the wrong place.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.