Quotes About Artistry

I don't write lyrics. I hear the track and sing in gibberish over it, then I try and fit words into the phrasing and melody that I already have set. Everything is left to chance.

I'll go in the studio and hear a track that I don't like, and they're trying to pay me to rap over it. But I'll tell them I just can't do it. And when they ask why, I say, 'Because then somebody's gonna hear it... damn, find another track.'

Overall, working with 50 Cent was one of my favourite moments. I grew up, like most of us did, listening to his music and loving him as an artist, so to be able to work with him as an actor was definitely something that was so exciting.

Why should anybody see our faces? What have our clothes got to do with anything? So we got the masks and the overalls, and we set about developing the most insane live shows that anyone has ever seen.

For a while, I Photoshopped too much. When you first learn what you can do, you really go overboard sometimes.

As a director, try to be humble and not to overdo it, not overcoverage and over-covering the scene.

We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.

If the story wasn't overly long, I'd type it out. And I'd carry it around with me for a week and jot notes on it, and then I'd throw it away and do another one.

Writing has never been an intentional endeavor to me. I know a lot of people have experiences and then sit down and try to sort them out through song, but whenever I sit down to write, it comes out hackneyed or overly saccharine.

I'd rather not ever make anything overly simple just because I'm scared people won't get it.

When I first was putting out music, I was like, 'I don't want to be overly sexy or do too much with the imaging or show too much skin, and I want to make sure my lyrics are balanced.'

Evergreen songs are not made overnight. They are cultivated and nurtured and born out of creative conflicts.

I hate the concept of beauty for the sake of it. It is overrated.

I think I'm overrated as a director!

I genuinely don't feel that anything that's been written or said about me has overshadowed my music, and that's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned.

There are different kinds of artists: the ones that inspire you, and the ones that overwhelm you.

If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than forced music. I mean, this world has enough of that right now, where it's basically McDonald's making music. 'Everybody needs another hamburger and fries.' Here's a piece of crap that nobody's gonna care about it two years.

Typing on an actual typewriter on paper is only a softer version of chiseling words into stone.

similar feat. A single deft stroke

Chief Bo as the center, dressed, in 2005, in bright red feathers, with beadwork that should be in a museum and probably will be someday

What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance," writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "rather than the quality of experience." But what if we don't want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.