Richard Ashcroft Quotes

My most prized possession would have to be 'Trick It.' I did rap here and there with some songs before, but 'Trick It' was my first time challenging myself to write lyrics from beginning to end.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

Writing must certainly be one of the hardest professions - writing and painting.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

Painting is as difficult as brain surgery. It's not that relaxing. But that's the discipline.

To me, a perfect album talks about the hard stuff and the fun and caring stuff.

As artists, it’s our job to delve into the uncomfortable, the difficult and the challenging.

I guess every musician looks forward to a point where they can just kind of make an album that truly is like a nice art album.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat.

Other times I say: I would very much like to try to do something with this music, but after playing for a few minutes, I have to break off.

The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer.

I'm going to be a better actor, or I'm going to try to be a better actor. I'm going to try to be a better musician. I'm going to be an artist instead of just this one thing.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

It takes more talent to write music, but it takes more courage to write lyrics.

I just like writing lyrics. I find a little satisfaction in performing live, making records. But primarily, I just try to write every day.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.