Kanye West Quotes

It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.

I live a normal life. But I'm always thinking about what I'm going to do next, musically. 'Do I need a fresh producer? What was Peter Gabriel doing when he was 32?'

I went through a pretty big David Bowie period when I was younger, and that has affected me profoundly in my life and my work.

As a musician, you want to be your own favorite artist and be able to make the music that is an accumulation of all your favorite influences.

While I was recording 'Ziltoid,' the movie 'Mars Attacks' came on TV, I think, six times in one week. So I don't know if there's any direct references or anything, but the aesthetics of that movie was definitely around while I was creating the music, so I'd be lying if I said it wasn't part of it.

Artwork, films, TV - it's always informed my work, no matter what I'm working on.

I would hope to make a record that interacts with culture in a macro sense. That is something to aspire to.

I love "Heartbreaker." "Heartbreaker" stands up for me still. It still works to me. The sentiment is still timely and it just works. But I don't want to do that again. I'm not interested in re-creating that. That was great and I'll just leave it there.

I sometimes wish I had never had to sell a painting. Every painting you make represents the time it was made and how you were feeling and what your influences were... You are never going to feel that way again, so you can never repeat it.

It was the case in the 70s and 80s that people believed music could change the world. But now people aren't making music because they want to change the world; they're making music because they want to just make a ton of money.

I approach my music-making as an art-form--something pure from the spirit to which I can add dynamics and marketable reality. Music is genuine and healthy and the stimulation I get from molding it and adding dynamics is like nothing else on earth.

I'm a failed pop star. I always sneak a song into everything I do.

Any time I write a new song, I am jazzed about it for like 24 hours and then I am over it and want to write another one.

People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else.

My brother & I have always said that to write a song, it takes all the experiences of your life, plus the time it takes to write it! To be specific, yes, sometimes a song takes place in one session - together in one day.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

Out of my entire annual output of songs, perhaps two, or at the most three, came as a result of inspiration. We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come.

I feel the popular music of a certain time really tells you a lot about what life was like in that period.

If you're in music, you're in music, and if you're in music you just want to keep making records and playing. That's what it's about, isn't it? At least, that's what I always thought it was about, anyway.

So that's the challenge for me and that has always been the challenge - finding that melody, that riff, that thing that just lights me up and makes me feel like it's Christmas.

That’s why I hate to take credit for the songs I’ve written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it’s been done and I’m just a courier bringing it into the world.

Some thoughts went through my head about recording some stuff that had influenced me earlier in my career like blues and early rock. But it didn't seem to really make sense at that point - it might have been taken the wrong way. A lot of people already had been into that trip.

Songwriters can’t explain. You get an idea and you don’t know where it’s come from. And if you’re lucky, you have a pencil or pen and can write it down.

I've been connected to the most culturally important albums of the past four years, the most influential artists of the past ten years. You have like, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Nicolas Ghesquière, Anna Wintour, David Stern.

I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just views it as like a curiosity.