Dennis DeYoung Quotes

Your limitations create your sound.

People ask me where I got my singing style. I didn't copy my style from anybody.

The fact that I could sing in a way that might not be right for RADA but is right for me was a brand-new concept.

I don't think people are fans of me because I wrote hit songs. I think they're fans because I'm a lunatic or a weirdo. The hit songs came out of my idiosyncratic personality, not the other way around.

I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?

Both my fathers are unconventional. They are like unicorns or wizards. They are musicians through and through. The way they think is just different.

I know that whatever I put out, whether people think it's pop or noise or whatever, it's always going to be some kind of a freak or mutation. It's not going to be anything pure that a lot of people will relate to. And that's fine.

As an artist, I try not to sound the same as others. Or even as myself.

I dont ever want to do anything mediocre. I hear the music in the charts and I dont mean to be rude, but those people have no soul. Learning from music is like eating a meal - you have to pace yourself. You cant take everything from it all at once. I want to be different, definitely. Im not a one trick pony. Im at least a five-trick pony.

For an artist, to be normal is a disaster

Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, you draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not. Don't worry about whether you're "commercial". Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.

No one wants my painting because it is different from other people's peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!

I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

It's not an act. I love it. It's totally original. People go, 'What's going on with this guy? Why does he sound so weird? What is going on in his brain. I don't know. Just one day I suddenly woke up with a new brain.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

What I aspire to do, and what I try the hardest to do, is write stuff that's very personal in its way. I figure I can only say things the way I say them, so I'm trying to do something that is kind of anti-generic.

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.

I want to be an artist you cannot categorize at all. You can't put a box around me. You can't put anything around me.

The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that.

They can sonically sound like me, but nobody's ever gonna be able to write songs like T-Pain. There's only one of those.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.