Quotes About Artistry

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

The William Tell Overture," complete with cannons and fireworks.

Don't listen to those who say you're taking too big a chance. [If he had], Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

I just do what I do. I like to make music.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.

Being a musician enables a person to bend the notes and express things that are inside you, no matter what.

I have so many opinions about everything it just comes out during my music. It's a battle for me. I try not to be preachy. That's a real danger.

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you've spent a long time drawing and sweating over it. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.

What an artist dies with me!

If we perform the romantic repertoire we need more musicians.

I probably wouldn't be singing if not for Michael Jackson. When I started singing, I didn't like my tone until my mom put me on to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, so listening to the way they used their instrument helped me get more comfortable with my own.

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.

because Beethoven did not know where it was going to end up. That, of course, is the point of sketching.

The French director Robert Bresson made the observation: "My job is not to find out what the public want and give it to them; my job is to make the public want what I want.

loves it, in fact, as much as anything she has ever done. After the brain deadening years of child-rearing, she feels like she is waking up, feels as if her mind is stirring after a long sleep, spluttering and juddering into motion. She enjoys the hours spent in the red light of the darkroom too, thrills (more than she

I think it's an essential fact for any performer or artist to fail as poignantly as they can succeed.

If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!

I've always had an obligation to creation, above all.

First, I always go for the key, then I go for the rhythm, then I go for the melody, then I go for the lyrics, OK? That's how I do it.

I've made bad records but I've never made a dishonest record, let's put it that way.

It's like there's a mighty reservoir of songs that no one's ever heard up there in heaven and there's a tap in Neil Young's brain that's somehow attached to it. All he has to do is ease his mind into the right gear and something will always come trickling down.