El-P Quotes

When you're an artist, you can't write with the intent of affecting anyone.

I can't just go into the studio with one idea and be all in on that, 100 percent. It takes me a while to arrive at something that feels like it's finished.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

Writing for me is a form of spiritual discipline and creative vision, a means of being in the world and giving one's love to it without compromise or dilution.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.

When I'm writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself - meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don't wait, or it's gone.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

No one was creating and I always wanted to be created on.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

Being essentially a creator, I never set out to shock, always thinking about creating my work and not about the benefits it could produce.

I really believe that every character comes from the well of the artist.

I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the biggest thrill in my life.

Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.

Maybe some people, when they sit down to write their great novel or make their great record or paint their great painting, they have it all planned out in their head. But for me, it's never worked that way.

I think an artist who has it in their heart to do or say something, they'll say it. It's not something that's mandatory, but it will come out.

I just follow what inspires me as an artist and a storyteller, and stay true to myself in my work.

We're all inspired by what has come before us, but hope to use the inspiration to create our own. That's the artist's journey. It's a pretty amazing path.

When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it's the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.

How many of you are creative? I don't know, but for me, when you make a bunch of things over time and then you keep them... you forget. I look through my sketchbooks and I'm an audience for myself.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

Whatever art form you're working in, it's crucial to see it clearly, to feel it clearly, and not to worry about the results, or how someone else will see it.

'Frances Ha' is the closest final product to what I had in my head of any movie I've made. I'm not entirely even sure why that is.

I write everything I do. On the average, it takes you about sixty months from the first molecule of an idea to it being in front of an audience. I'm actually somebody that creates their own stuff.

One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.