Ava DuVernay Quotes

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

Weezer isn't stuck in roles, so we just do what we want to do, what makes us excited.

My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by executives or publishers in terms of what's going to work and what's not. Don't react, just act.'

I like to make the music that I really love. You're supposed to make your favorite music that no one else played, and I'd like to just keep it at that and not really change it at all.

I am proud being an artist who takes risks, who would walk off a cliff artistically. I won't settle for commercial reasons.

Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.

Digital imaging has untied our hands with regards to technical limitations. We no longer have to be arbiters of technology; we get to participate in the interpretation of technology into creative content.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist.

I've realised that if I aim for a successful record, I probably won't have any success. But if I keep making weird things, then hopefully the audiences will come to us.

If I do what I really want to do, I'm not going to do a typical commercial Broadway show, so I'm going to write what I want to write.

What's frustrating to me is when, on a low-budget movie, people don't take chances. A big-budget movie, that script's your bible; nobody's going to risk going off the page. But when you're doing a very low-budget film, why not take some chances, intellectually, artistically?

We feel more and more intensely about the music we make. It's unexpected, and not always what you would think of in Beach House. It's all art in the end. We aren't making records because we have to; it's because it's what we want to express.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

It's up to the person who's being creative to find ways to emerge and shake up the world of wealth.

There are times when what you do will be mysterious to everyone... times when you have to change directions before people are ready. Just because someone does something that critics don't like or understand doesn't mean you're failing as a musician. It probably means you're growing.

I love Kanye, I love what he does musically, I love his ability to push the envelope.

I always use the Jeff Beck model. Jeff Beck is just a genius, and he keeps getting better ... If there's anybody in your field you want to aspire to be like, it is a guy who does what he wants to do. Every record at least he comes out with one thing that makes everybodys' jaw drop ... I would hope that Jimi Hendrix would have done that, although, man, the odds are against him because he did so much in such a short amount of time.

There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

All art is based on non-conformity.

There are so many different ways to make art. And so many good stories. You don't have to have a budget. I feel like it's super possible these days for people to make anything, no matter who you are or where you come from. And that's really exciting. I'm excited to see people around me pushing boundaries in that way, not letting certain structures define them or what art they can make.

Creativity is not and never has been sensible.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature.