Ani DiFranco Quotes

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

I've always felt like an outsider across the board, since day one. The challenge has been to simply not pay attention to my outsider or insider status and just do the work and play the shows and connect with the people. And not even bother to play this game of keeping score, which is what destroys you.

Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it's important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.

I'm inspired to write songs in many different ways - it can come from a melody, a word or phrase or something I have seen on my travels around the world. It's one of the great bonuses of my job in that I get to meet so many people and experience different cultures and it would be hard not to be inspired.

I was so thankful that I got to go back to comedy and I felt bad that I had abandoned something that I guess I was naturally given and lucky to have an loved all of my life, but didn't love it anymore because I didn't get to do it the right way.

It is an actor's passion to observe the world. It is his art to become what he observes. And finally, it is his job to let the world observe him.

There is Harlan Ellison the human being, who takes a crap a couple of times a day, and who farts, and who eats chicken croquettes, if I can find them. And then there is the writer, this writer-person, who is a much finer person than I. Much more orderly, much more meaningful. Worthier, than I [am].

It's funny, I don't even consider myself a rapper, I don't consider myself a designer, or even an actor. I just like creating stuff and trying to make good work, whatever it is. I don't care if it's designing toothbrushes. It's just making cool stuff to leave behind, that's all it is, it's nothing more.

He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.

Well it's hard to be yourself, it's the hardest job there is.

Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.

I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

"You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.

I don't ever want an acting to be a job. I want this to be an outlet for my creativity, and something I just simply enjoy doing. I don't ever want it to become something too serious.

I always liked making things, and then I fell into animation. And then luck comes into it as well.

My job as an artist is to present the material. My job as a woman is to receive from it what I need.

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

I feel very lucky to be making good work still. The confidence of youth, or that sort of competitiveness you get when you're 22 or 23, the impatience - that's probably been tempered. Hopefully I'm slightly better company.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

Every time I improvise I'm aware that I could be ruining what it is that we're doing and we'll just have to do it again.

The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.

Everything has already been done. every story has been told every scene has been shot. it’s our job to do it one better.

It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.

When I was living in Mexico, I started reassessing my drawing style, and plunged into a period of doing exercises and research to develop a new way to draw. The result was a style that implies more than it shows, and so, ironically, feels more "true" to the scene I want to draw than a style that is more specific. It seems to me that the reader's imagination is able to fill in the gaps more effectively than I ever could. Plus it's a lot faster and more fun to do.