Dave Matthews Quotes

It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rather than pushing it, that is the most exciting thing. It's that need to occasionally bounce off the walls, letting anything happen for any reason, and having nothing to guide you that is the joy.

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

I like surprising myself. I don't want to do the norm, do what I'm always known to do, write how I like to write.

Often, the fact that I haven't done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

They sent me some tapes of the original Mole and I thought it was pretty intriguing. I'm sort of an experimenter; I thought it'd be interesting to play around and see what's there. It was fun. Turned out to be good.

When I put my brush to canvas, I never know what I'm going to paint. It's like when you're walking down the street with your hands in your pockets, humming a tune, you don't know what you'll be humming five minutes from now.

There's not a formula that I'm following; it's just how I feel at the time. For instance, I did a very experimental film called 'Hardcore Henry,' and that was simply because I thought the filmmaker was very interesting and a risk taker. A film like that had never been made before, so I chose to do that at the time.

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

A lot of people probably get the idea that I'm this extremely calculated kind of guy, and in a lot of ways, I am. But when it comes to music or artistic expression, I'm very uncalculated and do things very spontaneous. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't want to do this anymore. I can't just play the same thing over and over; it would drive me crazy.

Give the composer time to experiment, time to try out ideas. Also, the time to fail. When the composer has very little time, the temptation is to reach for stock ideas - ideas they know will work and have worked in the past.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.

While you're making the film and working with the actors, if you want to have a little room to breathe and experiment and play, it grows, and you want that to happen. It's not enough to just shoot the script. You've gotta come up with new inspiration, as you shoot it. There's gotta be room for that and time for that, so it grows.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

I think making a movie or a record, the best things happen by accident - and those end up being the magic. Every time I've followed my gut it's been better than when I've tried to do what I was supposed to do.

That is a big danger, losing your inspiration. When I work in film and television I try to do each take a little differently. I never want to do the same thing twice, because then you're not being spontaneous, you're just recreating something.

Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dare.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

If there's room to make a record every year, and it sounds nothing like the old one, I might do that. It's easy to get in and have fun. To me, if it feels right, that's all that needs to be done.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

To keep the edge, you just keep doing something new. I'm not gonna say that working is easy, but while I'm doing it, I'm just a happy little moron - that's how my girlfriend describes me. The fact that nothing might happen with those things is not the point. The point is, I'm doing new things, and I have a good feeling in my soul.

Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.