Quotes About Creativity

If I had had a chance to tour with Van Halen before the record, I think it would have been a different record.

I love players like Thurston Moore. I mean, you can put notes down on a sheet of paper, and if you practice and get your chops up, you can play like an Eddie Van Halen or a Steve Vai. But nobody can do what Thurston Moore does; he's his own guy. He talks through his instrument in a language that's all his own.

Greg Ginn was certainly a huge influence on my guitar playing. I put him up there with people like Eddie Van Halen. Eddie Van Halen changed everything; I don't necessarily like everything he did, but he definitely changed everything.

Alex Van Halen... I loved his playing because he had so much energy; he made those songs exciting, along with everything else that went with him.

So everybody is trying to play like Eddie Van Halen. I think it's rubbish. I think Eddie's great, but everyone's trying to do what he does and it doesn't make for a lot of interesting music.

I loved Van Halen; I loved everything we did.

I think all my albums have concentrated on songs, I've never taken the typical Van Halen route to try and become a guitar hero.

In my job, I have many operations, so I tend to use time in my car to think. I get in the car after work and drive all night -11 hours, Vancouver to Banff.

I did photograph Angelina Jolie up in Vancouver when she was making 'Life Or Something Like It', and they gave me the drawings they wanted me to photograph of her up there, but she didn't really care for them that much, and ultimately they weren't even used.

In fashion, you're privileged because you're consistently working with a vanguard of youth.

Most actors don't grow up with sweet, vanilla parents.

People don't want just vanilla. They want 31 flavors. I couldn't do what Rihanna does. I couldn't do what Gaga does. They can't do what I do.

The down-side of these huge-budget movies is that so many people have a hand in them, sometimes they come out a little more vanilla.

The world isn't all happy, shiny people, and great art doesn't come from vanilla. Great art comes from people with a point of view and are very passionate.

I like to, you know, add a little bit of my expression into my coffee - I was really doing French Vanilla for a minute, but I realized that the International Delight Caramel Macchiato: She's the girl for me.

Sometimes you have to go and do something different. I'll just disappear and write a couple of books, and then go back and do some TV when I've been forgotten about, and people think it's fresh. I see people who suddenly put themselves around everywhere and I think, 'You're going to last for about two years and vanish.'

I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.

If you're concentrating so damn hard on a piece of mathematics or a musical - a piece of music or a piece of art, the restraint that holds the rest of - the rest of the world back off and vanishes in the rest of your life.

If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.

I've been a big fan always of getting my camera in different places and trying to seek the unusual vantage point.

There have been times I've planted stuff in songs where four years later I'll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind... and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I'll hear a line from a different vantage point and it'll change its meaning. It's something I wrote but it changed because I did.

For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.

When I became a father, I saw what passed for family entertainment. So much of it was vapid. I wanted to make things that mattered.

I'm tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things I enjoy somehow make me a lesser person.