Quotes About Creativity

Kids would come up to me after concerts and give me drawings they've made of violins or, you know, landscapes with a violin floating in it or some sketch of a concert or a portrait of me.

I was leaving my violin out of a lot of songs, and that's a strange thing to do because I've been playing the violin since I was 2. It's a part of me. Adding pedals and sounds is great because I get to play the instrument I feel most comfortable on and the one I feel gives my truest expression when I'm making a solo or anything like that.

I started playing violin when I was about five years old and I learned to read a little bit of music, but that's all been long, long forgotten! I actually quit violin to teach myself guitar and just went from there.

I always wanted to do a song with a violin; I always loved the sound of the instrument, especially for melodic stuff.

The constant in all the businesses I've become a part of is taking what I do and making it real for everyone. I believe fantasy and dreaming can be made a reality. You don't have to be rich. You don't have to be a VIP.

While shooting for 'Kodi' at Pollachi, I got this new idea for 'VIP 2'.

A lot of people were getting million-dollar deals from music I felt was trash, because their videos were going viral. I wanted to put out music that had soul, because that's what was missing.

My top video is probably the wake up machine. And that one was the first one that started going really viral. It's an alarm clock that slaps you in the face with a rubber arm.

A lot of people don't give Virginia credit. Pharrell, Missy Elliott - a lot of people come from here.

I live in Virginia alone, and sometimes there's too much time to think. So you turn on the TV, but sometimes that don't do, so you turn the music on, and sometimes that don't do, and so you try and write a song, and sometimes that don't do... So you just take it as it comes.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.

My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

Virginia Beach is just such a melting pot for so many different things, and they just have so many influences. I would always say that the area definitely influences Play Cloths. The area itself just has so many influences, whether it be fashion, music, everything.

I write about Texas, New York, California and Virginia, and they're all important places in my repertoire.

When I was a 12-year-old middle-schooler in Richmond, Virginia, my local newspaper published an op-ed that I wrote all by myself.

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

Think of Virginia Woolf, 'A Room of One's Own' - that's what women have always needed under patriarchy and can't be creative without. They took away my classroom and my status to teach, and now they have taken away my office, and all of it is giving the message that Virginia Woolf and I are losing what I call 'womenspace.'

I would like to sit down with Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, PJ Harvey, and Bjork. That would be a good dinner in my mind. Strong women. I think I would enjoy that.

It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.

I rap, and I work with this dude named Chemist, who lives in Virginia. He's my go-to producer and does a lot of my own music - he's on my 'Rich Black American' mixtape.