Schoolboy Q Quotes

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.

I wish that I could write. I think that's a wonderful outlet for an artist. You are ultimately in control. Your fate is not determined by outside influences. You can write wherever you are. I don't think I have the talent.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque.

The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.

I don't want to be held down by genres so much.

Many people say to me, particularly about my dance writing, 'It sounds just like you.' But it sounds just like me after I've made it sound like me.

I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

I love the creative process, of getting to create your own show or your own movie, whatever it is you want to do, and have the resources to try and make that happen.

That's the thing about creating. When you create, you create your own thing, whatever that is. It's always going to seep through in whatever you do.

When it comes to creativity, or my artistry, when it comes to how I wear my hair and what I'm dressing like, some things I'm going to fight for; and it's really about picking the battles, but usually I'm not backing down.

I've seen situations where I think comics are really unrealistic about what creative expression and what the artistic freedom, what that entails.

I think I'm just doing me, my music, my shows, and my stories.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

I don't think comedians make an active decision to be a certain "persona." Comedians write the way they're going to write.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

I know my fans look up to me and that's why I make my songs so personal; it's all about things I've experienced and things I like or hate. I write for myself and hope that my fans like what I have to say.

I love the freedom of writing and then I love the realization of directing. I can't favor one or the other. I enjoy both parts of the process.

When I'm writing my album, it's totally my world. Even though it's myself and another producer creating the project, Conceptually it's more under my power and on my own terms. At the same time, it's a different type of pressure because I'm ultimately speaking, I'm solely responsible for the end result.

I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.

Then little writings and recordings that thankfully continue to come up. I'm in this kind of wonderful, kind of awkward, off-putting, and strange position where there's nothing I want to do more than continue to make music, but the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially.