James Arthur Quotes

Nature always begins by resisting the artist, but he who really takes it seriously does not allow that resistance to put him off his stride; on the contrary, it is that much more of a stimulus to fight for victory.

I have to confess that I'm in a constant state of evolution in terms of the way I feel about it. When I was doing early pieces, I wasn't exactly in love with the idea of building the stuff. I could do it because I had the skills, but I really did it because I couldn't find anyone else to build it for me.

Making my last record, Warrior, was a pretty miserable process, and it wore my spirit down. I was fighting like hell to keep my whole irreverent essence and everything raw and visceral that I stand for in it, but in the end I was promoting something that wasn't the animal I wanted it to be. I decided to face my problem head-on.

Singing other people's material was perceived, I think, as a weakness of my persona. The effect, though, was to make me dig my heels in and try even harder to combine the two.

Your first attempt will be terrible.... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft..... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.

I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.

In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.

Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don't know what it's like for a project to come easy.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

To be an artist is to doubt yourself and try harder.

There are just times when it seems you can't do anything wrong. Then there are other times when whatever you do is wrong. I think I could have had more drive. I was never very ambitious.

I want to make a better record than I made the last time. I want to grow. I want to discover new things about myself creatively.

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

When you create stuff, you're always going to be progressing and where you're at a year down the line, as the creator, it's always going to feel immature. You're going to notice the flaws and the things that you've learned in that year aren't going to be there. So, I think it's important to see stuff as a capture of time - that's what I was doing at that time - and not be ashamed of it. That's how I try to approach music.

I can remember a lot of nights performing in those early years where you felt that you hit some good moments, but a lot of the time you're thinking, "Oh, God, this isn't quite making it." So I think that is what makes you in the end refine your view of things a little bit.

I think the time in between albums, as much as it was not anticipated, it was much-needed, and very helpful, very useful. I've done nothing but hone my craft, and get better, and learn, and gather information in the process. So I'm grateful for it in retrospect.

I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.

There's a tendency for us to think that the secret of our success is something that is mystical and maybe someday my time will come. And it's certainly out there somewhere; it's around the bend; it's at the top of the hill.

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

For sure I think that at the end of the day if I got started a little sooner on stuff that was more written more permanent I would have just made a lot of mistakes earlier. I don't know if it would have led to earlier success but I think it would have led to thicker skin and it would have gotten the ball rolling.

I always think I'm lazy, maybe I could do better, I could make more effort and I always have the feeling that there is a glass wall that I cannot get through. But maybe when I get through, then it's over.

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

I think the most important thing for me is a challenge. I'm not happy, creatively, unless I'm faced with a challenge. So, overcoming those challenges and really discovering characters that aren't like me helps me grow, as a person and as an artist.

For the most part I stand by all of records. I just always like the one I've done most recently the best and I think that's the whole point.

I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .