Nikki Grimes Quotes

A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.

Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.

An artist must find his expression closely linked to his individual experience or else follow in the old grooves resulting in lifeless forms.

As an experienced artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

The past is part of the present, is part of the future, it's all part of being an artist. You cannot be something that you're not when you're not that thing anymore, and if you do that then you're a liar.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist.

Artists are all giving so much of ourselves to the work and the people and the press and the media and Twitter and all that now. For me, being able to create from a genuine place is really difficult lately because there's so much going on all the time, but when all that stuff gets quiet, you can explore your ideas without any ego or mental chatter.

Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.

It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing.

We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.

An artist is an explorer.

To me, it's an honour to be accepted as a hip hop artist, it gives me a lot of opportunity to express myself.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

If you are any kind of an artist, then validation . . . can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway.

I feel that what I do is always contemporary with the society I'm living in... If I wanted to explain myself, that's how I'd explain myself: that I'm a diarist.

When I first started, I wrote some songs with Linda Perry. She's so instrumental in a lot of artist's lives, listening to you and then helping you write songs that are you, that bring the most of what you are out, whereas a lot of producers might put their stamp on you. I gained confidence because I'm less of a straight-up, traditional vocalist.

When you're an artist you're speaking about life, you're talking about your experience here on the planet. So essentially, that's what I do when I'm writing songs.