Jaboukie Young-White Quotes

The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.

I don't try to be original; I just always want to do something that excites me.

I always want to surprise myself, more than anybody else.

I'm interested in doing everything and anything that I can to squeeze that creativity out of my brain. I guess I'm sort of a performance rat.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

There's a child within me. Everything is fascinating. The hunger to learn, do better and more creative things never goes.

Relevance, for me, is about being creative and doing things that you believe in, whether that's music or acting or painting a picture, or whatever that is.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

To create something you must be something.

Learn the duty as well as taste the pleasure of original work.

I wanna be more like the Rihanna kind of, Beyonce kind of thing, but I don't want to compare myself to anybody, because I wanna be somebody new, too.

I act because I have to, because I need to find out whether I can do it or not - that's what drives me and excites me and lights me up.

I always try to improve, to find new ways of expressing myself, to keep looking for truth and originality.

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

But when you're beginning, you should try to focus on something you love and your own way of doing things.

I always try to put myself in the way of surprise as much as possible. My ambition is to keep challenging myself. I like that journey of discovery.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur like someone else is actually looking in the wrong direction. You don't look out for inspiration, you look in. You have to ask yourself how can I be better today, at solving the problem I am trying to solve for my company. I wouldn't encourage anyone to be like me. Just be like you.

I think it's most important to, rather than just do what everybody else is doing, like tons of selfies, find out what makes you excited. You know, is it taking pictures and doing cool makeup and making yourself look great? If so, wonderful. Is it music? Is it teaching something? Are you great at teaching?

I care about being creative and expressing myself.

You can't ever create defensively. You just have to create the next thing that really speaks to you.

When you can surprise yourself, you're truly acting.

My motivation is not to try to inspire, but rather to do things that inspire me and hopefully that will spread to others.