Quotes About Artistry

But the truth is that L.A. was never entirely real anyway, as Steely Dan, Randy Newman, Warren Zevon, Larry David and Alan Ball all understood.

I've gotten to the point where I realize that I need to tell my truth in music and not walk around blabbing my mind.

To tell you the truth, I don't ever talk about characters as separate from myself.

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

Motivation is just this potion to create stuff, a compulsion to express the truth of my own experiences in this life.

My music has to do with imaginary things, so I took that concept and used the whole "the music is not the truth" mantra as a way to market myself.

What the artist should be asking is, "Am I being honest? Am I being myself? Am I searching for the truth? Am I reporting my experience of life and the world as I see and experience it?

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

Talent is truth on display.

One of the joys of writing music is making your own mark. Study other stuff, immerse yourself in music and then tell your own truth.

When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.

A deeper truth the camera can see can be more surprising than even the director imagined it could be. That's a wonderful thing that grows and happens in films.

Truth is the number one element in whatever you do with music.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

The garden, by its artistry and resonance, touched him deeply, peeling away layers of emotion and inner conflicts.

Artistically (and in many other ways), the band was liberated by the fact that they'd never sign to a major label. "In a way, we were cheating because we didn't have that light at the end of the tunnel," Prescott says. "And who knows? We were human—if the light had been there, maybe we would have turned crappy quicker. It's a really hard thing to say. Now I'm glad that it was like it was.

you could perform together because you were coming from the same places in your heart. You may not make the same music, but you feel about music the same way.

What we were doing wasn't about being really good musicians," Lewis says. "It always seemed to me it was about making a song. We're just making a song.

We write songs rather than riffs with statements." "That was maybe the beginning of thinking, 'Aw, I don't know if we fit into this,' " says Mars. "So let's have a hootenanny here, let's settle down and have a hoedown and loosen it up and have some fun.

we don't write songs, we write rivers

Musicians here weren't afraid to go out and work really hard for satisfaction more than for success. That's what it came down to—you were working for some other notion of glory than financial.

People got this idea that ultimately what mattered was the quality of what you were doing and how much importance you gave to it, regardless of how widespread it became or how many records it sold.

The band readily acknowledged that they borrowed ideas rather than making up their own. "That's all you can do today," Turner explained. "I think you're kinda fooling yourself as a rock band if you think you're doing something really original.