Colson Whitehead Quotes

I am a poet; I am not a worker. I need to be free.

I'd just like to inspire people to be themselves and do what they want and not conform to the rigid guidelines of the music or entertainment business.

I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

I'm an older woman who's not going to have a shiny pop song ever again, so that gives me license to do whatever the hell I want.

You know the question: 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' Answer: 'Practise?' Well, in my case, I got there by not practising. I didn't finish my music degree. And when I got into the pop world, I decided not to conform because I figured that the point of being an artist was that you shouldn't be like anyone else.

My art side is free and there are no strings attached.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

I do not want to work to correspond to an image.

Writing is an incredibly creatively empowering experience for me. It is the place where nobody tries to control what I'm doing.

There's a certain freedom in writing when you don't know if you'll ever have an audience.

I don't care about commercial success. I get to do what I love and communicate whatever I want.

I want to be free to be any version of me I feel like being. I don't want to be McDonald's that serves the same food every time.

I never realized how much I cherished having creative freedom.

In the entertainment world, you can have more of a personality and be yourself. You don't have to look like a standard of beauty. You can have something provocative to say.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

It's nice to really have the freedom to write what I want.

That's what I feel like my music represents - having no limits or restrictions.

I love the idea of challenging what the standards is.

I get flak from everybody, which is how I know I'm living my truth.

I can't tell you the amount of support I'm getting from WWE. They're allowing me to express myself freely, they're promoting me, and they're letting me be me.

One of the beauties about going solo was being able to start from scratch and say, 'What do I really want? What kind of band do I really want? What kind of live show do I really want to stage?' Without any of the baggage of being something with history.

I don't think that people should be confined to any particular aesthetic.

I never felt like I had to sound like my dad. I wanted my music to be creative expression with no expectations.