Mason Cooley Quotes

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

The first album was a very successful record. It made me very visible and it's an immediate association, but I don't do that anymore. Now I'm true to myself as an artist again. I'm more vocally oriented.

It wasn't until Duotones that I felt my true voice come out.

You have to be clear what your message is and what you're doing. I mean, Miley Cyrus is an amazing talent, and sometimes you kind of just want to say, 'We know you're not Hannah Montana anymore. We know that, my dear. My darling. Now, go be great.'

Not to compare an actor to a painter, but you can go through different phases and still be the same artist, y'know?

I'm now able to show who I am as an artist.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

I've really come into my own as an artist. I'm much more sure of my identity and understand it much better, and have accepted the fact that I like to jump around a lot in terms of who I am and what kind of music I create, and that it is okay - in fact, that is my main identity, the fact that I do that.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

I didn't know how to play guitar until I was 21, but from the moment I was good enough on guitar to even put one song together, I kind of billed myself as an artist.

Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

......so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

I had a visit from an artist friend who basically said, "Your paintings are wonderful. Now stop." It did resonate with me. It hit on the percolating need for change that was already there. I got a little push. I did a group of the paintings early on that were among the best. It was sort of beginner's luck with these.

I've lost, but I also gained a lot. I'm a creative person, and no one can take that away from me. I've been told I committed professional suicide because it was the only escape from the terrible pressures I was facing. What do you think?

I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.

As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn't know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.

K. Dot was a kid who was trying to find himself in music, finding trends, um, bending towards - ready to bend towards what the industry was telling me to do and after you mature at a certain time in your life, you come into your own...your own niche, your own personality, not only as an artist but as a person.

The creative process must be explored... as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.

Memphis held onto me until I was far enough along in my art and then it let me go.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.