Quotes About Artistry

I think I have a kind of Tourette's syndrome where if you're not supposed to say something, it becomes very attractive to do so. You're in a rock band – what can't you talk about? God? Okay, here we go. You're supposed to write songs about sex and drugs. Well, no I won't.

I am a baritone who thinks he's a tenor.

It is one of the arts of a great beauty to heighten the effect of her charms by affecting to be sweetly unconscious of them.

Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

The only difference, I suppose, between them and me is that I never set out to write shit. (That is: merely sufficient, average.) And of all the crimes that may be attributed to me—numbering among them rudeness, lechery, viciousness, imprudence and disgusting egocentricity—the one that can never be laid on me is the one epitomized by the line, "I just write what they want, by Tuesday, take the money and run.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.

He was as good as his worst performance; his worst performance was Gothic.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage

What do you mean, 'playing really creatively'? Can you give me an example? Hmm, let's see ... you send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that kind of shared state. Probably.

What is originality, after all, but the shape that results from the natural impulse to communicate to others that feeling of freedom, that unconstrained joy?

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist.

Writing a novel is like having a dream.

on the future of hand-drawn animation] I'm actually not that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I'm more interested in those people than I am in big business.

Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.

To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures

Scientists could make a human, but they could not make an artist.

As soon as I started writing, other writers stopped wanting me acting in their shows - maybe they thought I was going to rewrite them.

My nails are my rhythm section when I'm writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

I sing because I love singing. I perform because I love performing. I write because I actually enjoy writing.

Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.