Quotes About Artistry

We make our own music, and the songs appeal to the public well, and the public likes them.

I like coming up with new characters. Whether it's revamping an old character no one likes or just coming up with brand-new stuff, that's kind of what excited me as an artist.

You can't try and make something you think someone else will like. You can only make what you like. How can you make a song that Yo-Landi Visser likes? You don't know me. You'll never understand me.

While I hope that people like my work, I don't think an artist should be afraid of ­people not liking his work.

I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.

I don't mind people liking or not liking me. If you make something and then in the back of your mind you think it could have been a bit better, that can hurt a bit.

I didn't like being out in the limelight. I love performing, but that's it.

I don't like albums; I like projects. I want to tell a story - I don't want to limit myself to 10 songs or four songs or whatever. I just tell a story and I want you to feel something. If it took me one song or if it took me four, call it however you want. So I call them projects.

I don't really design for myself. It would be very limiting.

I never have a genre in mind when I'm making music because I just like to be free. I feel that placing a genre on your music is limiting yourself.

I've always been political but I don't like to bring it into my work any more because I think it limits me.

Sometimes in a movie, the lines are so perfect.

I don't want to say the same lines every night.

I see lines of space. I break things down into lines and space, and I balance.

I wrote 'Linger' in about eight minutes. But some songs will take weeks to write.

The music I make, it's so hard. I listen to it 100,000 times before it even drops.

'What's Going On' is one of the greatest albums ever made. I definitely wasn't aiming to make my 'What's Going On,' you know what I mean? That album is definitely deep in my DNA. I've probably listened to that more than maybe any other album ever in my entire life.

I think that the music that I listened to turned me into the artist that I am.

People associate me with Al Green and Curtis Mayfield, but these aren't people that I listened to growing up. I got into them much later.

I used to consider the listener. But now I'm in a space where, if I'm not inspired, I can't really do the music. I can't feel it.

Sometimes, when you get into a record, it's like writing a book, and you get so far inside the story you can't tell anymore if it's gonna be good to an outside listener.

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.

I really love listening to Hozier. He's great.

Movies are too literal.