Quotes About Artistry

It was important for me as a theater artist to allow myself and my interests to evolve over time and allow my notion of what success meant to evolve over time. I've always had a day job and never been just acting. But it didn't make me feel like I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.

The initial notion for 'Check Your Head' was just all three of us getting back to playing instruments.

There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed.

Me as an artist, I'm more notorious for writing songs that celebrate women, songs that are all about the positive element of the immensely confusing creature that is woman.

I get most of my influences from specific genres. I listen to a lot of R&B music, obviously. But, jazz, and bossa nova music, too.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel.

It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

I write novels and other things.

Now everybody's sampling.

I want to direct every now and then, but I don't want to be a director.

To have a sort of career in music still kind of freaks me out every now and then.

That's what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, 'Oh, somebody coughed in the background; we need to take that out' - or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

It's amazing what they can do with animation nowadays. It's really beautiful. The 3D stuff is out of hand.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

When you come from nowhere, I am fully aware of the fact that people have to compare you to other artists to kind of place you.

My best moments are when I write songs out of nowhere.

It can't just be about being sexy. It has to have all the emotions involved, I think, on the album and in the live show. Because if you do all sex, you lose all of the other beautiful things that should be a part of it... And just being sexy will get you nowhere.

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

I am who I am. I can't do anything that doesn't have nuances of all the music I've done in the past.

You work on something for so long that you become numb to it. Like, you don't even know how to listen to it because you listened to it so many times.