Quotes About Artistry

My band and I, we cover our bodies in hairspray and glitter. We use the hairspray to make sure the glitter sticks.

I never saw myself as the classic singer/songwriter who sticks to his guitar.

You may stifle your creativity by learning too much about processes that should be spontaneous and automatic.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

Muse. Mu-se. It's a great thing, for someone to feel that they can draw inspiration from you. And I don't think it's necessarily a man 'taking' from a woman. It can go both ways, both can stimulate, excite.

I go to see some big shows of other bands, and I feel like I'm so bombarded and over-stimulated that I lose interest in the music. There has to be light and shade, and less stimulating moments. There has to be an arc to the show.

I like to work with people that I find interesting and stimulating artistically, and the field in which they're perceived to work is secondary and not that relevant to me.

I was into the Police. I dyed my hair white-blond and wanted to be Sting.

I try to keep away from being big-headed. That's what causes people to lose the acting thing. They start being commercial, and then they stink for the rest of their lives.

I think the job of artists is to stir things up.

I never thought of myself as capable of stirring up - generating - the actual drumroll for a record, you know, all the press.

I can stitch a song together in about an hour anytime you want, but it won't have the depth.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

When you make music, and even if it's commercially successful, it doesn't mean that it's going to hold up. It takes time to sort of take stock of what you've done and whether it's got legs and whether it's going to really have a place.

Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.

I always thought those old drab clothes from 'Silk Stockings' were the worst things I wore.

I'll know when a song's really awesome, for sure, and I get super stoked, and I'm so high when I'm hearing it back, but then you sit with the record forever. You're mixing it, and you can really just over-think everything.

I've always gone to see all kinds of shows and stole what I could, as we all do. We see an artist and hear a song and think, 'I bet I could sing that song. I'll put that in my show.'

I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.

I've stolen licks from just about every person that ever picked up a guitar. We all borrow from one another; it's called legitimate stealing.

I can't usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it's new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it's about function.

I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that.

I can never look at anything I do subjectively - whether it's a Stone Sour record or a Slipknot record, I can never really have my own opinion of it, 'cos in my opinion it's all crap.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.