Quotes About Artistry

The fact of the matter is that all true artistes are androgynous by nature, the yin and yang perfectly balanced.

We are the yin and the yang of the creative process.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

If composing music is like going to the gym in the morning, acting is like an additional session of yoga. They don't need to be mutually exclusive.

Actually, I never liked Dylan's kind of music before; I always thought he sounded just like Yogi Bear.

I remember, in my first show in New York, they asked, 'Where is the Indian-ness in your work?'... Now, the same people, after having watched the body of my work, say, 'There is too much Indian philosophy in your work.' They're looking for a superficial skin-level Indian-ness, which I'm not about.

After 'Spelling Bee,' I started landing more jobs... I got 'Candide' at New York City Opera.

I'm not saying you have to be totally despondent or anything, but... in New York, it's cold sometimes; it rains sometimes; even if everything in your life is great, bad weather can set the mood. You can write songs in New York because it's not always perfect. To write a good song, things can't be perfect.

To become a classical ballerina, you have to move to New York when you're 12 or 11 and that becomes your life. I just wanted to be good in my company in Charleston and I wanted it to always be part of my life.

You can't buy vision, and you can't buy aesthetic.

Whatever you go into, you have to go in there to be the best. There's no formulas. It's all about passion and honesty and hard work. It might look glamorous, but it takes a lot of hard work. The blessing with the arts is that you can do it forever.

I think the best part about music is that you can do it anywhere at any time and it's always with you.

In certain professions, you can love your profession; you can do it in a very professional way and do it wonderfully, but you do not have this possibility to communicate with others - I express myself singing, and I think this is a real luxury.

There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is.

You don't always just have to do an indie movie to feel like you're controlling it with a few people that you really have connected with, creatively. You can do it on a bigger scale.

It used to be you would need a couple grand to make a record at a studio. Now, you can do it on freaking GarageBand.

I went to Westside School of Ballet in L.A. and I was climbing through the ranks. Then I got to pointe shoes and I was like, 'This is not cool, you guys. This is gonna be in textbooks, someday, along with Chinese foot-binding.' Anyway, it's not for me, so I got into doing different kinds of dance.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

My goal the whole time has been for people to see me as a stand-alone artist. I came out with Young Money, the biggest hip-hop label in the world at the time. And then it was, 'How do I branch away from Lil Wayne?'

I don't play an instrument - I just write in my head, and I usually hear fully formed songs. 'We Are Young' turned out so much like it was in my head. But it also exceeded all my expectations.

When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.

I'm still so young, so I feel like people have wanted to keep me in a 'no-makeup' fresh type of look - sometimes artists are a little afraid of really putting the makeup on me.

I say this to young actors: You don't get into this because you think you're average. You get into this because you think, 'I'm good.' It's an art form, and I'm an artist. But as an artist, you know there's not a soul in the world that's going to believe in you other than yourself.

I have only really gotten by with playing versions of myself as most young actors do.