Robert Lloyd Quotes

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

Usually, I create tunes that are fragmented. I think the biggest obstacle for people with their creativity is that they feel they have to sit down and create this finished, polished product.

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

There's no such thing as writer's block. I'm brilliant all the time every day. It never stops.

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

Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.

I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.

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.

Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy.

If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands.

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Artistic inspiration ignores the law of supply and demand.

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

You can't manufacture inspiration, so a lot of it is still a waiting game for me. There's still a lot of mystery to songwriting. I don't have a method that I can go back to - they either come or they don't.