Todd Rundgren Quotes

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

Every time I do a cover, I completely... pick apart - I take apart the entire song and really reconstruct it. I try and make it my own.

I'm interested in taking a form, breaking it apart, and then rebuilding it. It is about transformation for me...it is a very core notion that stabilizes my practice.

I don't love performing, because it's nerve-racking and it's time - consuming to rehearse a whole set - and my time can often be better served writing music and just making it and putting it out.

Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. [...] Then make up your own story.

Every time I make a record, it's kind of like scarification or something. You work 15 hours until you're stupid. You're just kind of all jittery.

The Coens both give you direction, and then it's up to you to kind of figure out the music of what they're saying.

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.

John [Cassavetes] loved actors. He gave them a lot of freedom. So if something came up that a certain actor just felt at the moment and said - that kind of improvisation he would accept. He gave very little direction.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

When you're doing standup you're kind of doing, "Hey. I thought of this. This may be funny.

If it's something that I feel uncomfortable with, that's a reason for me to write it. I kind of like to make myself feel uncomfortable. I think if you're starting to feel uncomfortable with something when you're writing it, that's the reason really to push on with it.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

For me the visual is just as important as the music. I would never record without my red lipstick. It was my way of getting into character, sort of like Method singing.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

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

Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much you approach the songs in pretty much the same way. The difference might be that in a film you have a close up. On stage you don't. So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

I like to imagine that all the choices you make during the day that you're doing a particular scene are going to feed into the creation of that scene. It's not a movie-by-movie or a part-by-part basis. It's a day-by-day thing, and sometimes an hour-by-hour thing.

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.

What I hold dear is well-known to all of my colleagues. And, really, The Times is the kind of place, the greatest journalism doesn't just pop forth from our heads. It's, you know, a group of people, and the great ideas bubble up from the reporters to their editors and get to us.