Quotes About Artistry

There was one thing I loved a little bit more than surfing - and that was acting.

It's not brain surgery. I focus on getting the costumes right, getting the body language. I do what I can with the makeup.

I never thought make-up was like brain surgery.

I love playing music and I'm serious about It. But It's not brain surgery.

Fashion and style is just that. Fashion and style. It's not brain surgery.

Being naive I think is how you construct new music. When you start thinking too much what is it you're doing? You're just making an album. You're not doing brain surgery. If you take it too seriously you start taking yourself too seriously.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

Occasionally, you get a nice surprise when someone covers your song in an extraordinary way.

I don't like the idea of pre-meditated music. Things like free-styling, the element of surprise - I think people need to scale back and re-focus on making moments again.

With solos, I don't like to be too prepared going in - I like to surprise myself.

If they aren't real enough to surprise me, then they aren't real enough to go on the page.

Scratch an artist and you surprise a child.

There's this element of surprise when you're writing songs, like it's something outside of you that you get to be part of. And it's just exciting. And that's why I keep writing - because I like that feeling.

The director Steve McQueen has found a way to constantly include the element of surprise in his work, both as an artist and as a filmmaker.

In terms of the music, it feels almost like trouble's a good thing - you never know when a song is going to surprise you. We look for these subversive moments in songs.

There's nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It's wonderful music. It's - on a grand scale, there's a lot to it. There are - I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.

I think the best actors do both. I think they fulfill what you want them to do, in terms of the vision for the whole piece. And then they always bring something that does surprise you and shock you.

I make music and hope people enjoy it - but when they do it's always a surprise. A nice surprise, but not one that I expect to always be there.

I understand, as an artist as well as a producer, the need for there to be mystery and surprise.

When I was making 'Xen,' I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn't deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.

Looking back, I'm surprised I had the nerve to do it, but I'm glad I did. Performing the songs and performing in film was just a part of my personality, just like football and boxing at one point in my life. I was able to lose myself in both of them, and that was a good feeling.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

Theater is about surprises and things that you haven't seen before on stage.