Flying Lotus Quotes

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.

A creative space is an important thing. There are so many studios that feel like doctor's offices in Nashville. I couldn't write there.

Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Dead, Zeppelin, the Beatles - I paint to this music all of the time.

I've written songs everywhere, and I think the place does matter.

It's weird: I don't really know where I pull my inspiration from. I think it's N.E.R.D.

I do love being amongst creative people and facilitating that and being inspired by people. I get very bored with just competence and require inspiration all around me.

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

It's a funny thing with the inspiration thing. There's always loads of music around that I absolutely love and films going back to when I started making film music in the mid-80's.

You absorb so much from whatever your environment is, as an artist, and you learn to take from it what can help you create.

When I write, it's intimate. I write in the car, and I don't even hear, like, ambulances driving past me because I'm in my car, listening to the music, writing. I record in an attic with no booth. It's not like I'm in the dark with candles, but it's like a house, a home, and I record like that. I think that plays into the music.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

I do it when I'm a preparing for a role quite a bit - I sit with music. It helps influence the discovery of something. Then sometimes during filming I like to listen to the same things. It brings me back to a place where I just feel more creative and focused.

I listened to a lot of old school, golden era music. It gave me a lot of insight on how to rap and give my all.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer's drug, but I'm glad that's been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.

I honestly just love being in my studio working on music. That's all the inspiration I need. And I don't write with an end result in mind, I just write for the simple love of writing.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

I haven't felt compelled to go back in the studio and do anything serious. I have a little sort of home studio thing which I potter about in occasionally.

As an artist, you take things from your environment, and there's going to be a style coming out of your environment.

A painter must not only be of necessity an imitator of the works of nature... but he must be as necessarily an imitator of the works of other painters. This appears more humiliating, but is equally true; and no man can be an artist, whatever he may suppose, upon any other terms.

The power of music is still with me, every day. It's one of the most inspiring things available in the world. I write with music. I write scenes in movies that hopefully can earn the use of some songs that are powerful to me. But, I think it just came from being affected by strong, personal art.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.