D'Angelo Quotes

The Strokes can play anything. They could play 'Thriller,' and it would just sound like 'Thriller' as played by the Strokes.

I believe that as an entertainer, you're only as good as your audience and the people who support you.

I think, actually, that rock and roll is a misconception. It should no longer be a term for music.

The music's rehearsed a lot. All people think about is, they think, in rock 'n' roll, they get the music off right and they think it's okay standing, looking macho. Well, it's not. That's boring. If you want to be a performer you've got to do a lot more work than that.

Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

I didn’t see any difference between being a photographer or being an artist. I didn’t make those boundaries. If someone wants to think it’s art, that’s great, but I’ll let history decide.

My experience of singing, as an actor, was that there's a different creative feeling of freedom. The acting thing is a bit more defined and cerebral. I can see why people would want to cross over. If you have so much freedom on stage then perhaps you want to be confined a bit, and vice versa.

I think it's a privilege to be able to fly to somewhere where people want to see my show.

I just think that pop music is very interesting in how it can reach so many people. I like that I can tell stories and I just wanted to be heard more, I guess. That's why it's pop, but in my mind I don't really view my music as pop, I don't really view it as anything. I just look at it as a picture, I like visuals.

I don't think rock music has any positive function.

We came out right in the middle of the hard-rock period... it was hard-rock everywhere! But we were ready to make our music, you know?And it was such a turn around, I guess it caught people by surprise.

I don't get my bliss by listening over and over to people in the street thinking, "Boy, is it that good?" Even though every time I hear it that's what I think. But I get it in human situations. There is this little voice that is going, "The reason you're able to enjoy your life now is that you made it in rock'n'roll and people are giving you free visas all over the place. Dude, you are being spoiled".

I think Alice [Cooper] probably, on some level, recognized that good old self-destructive streak that does happen in some people's lives. So, though I wasn't there with Alice and the Vampires, but I'd give anything in the world to have been, I had my own version, I suppose, a little later.

Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job.

As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

People are very uncomfortable when you call actors artists because there are a lot of actors out there that aren't artists - there are a lot of actors that are hired for very specific reasons that are shallow and have to do with sexual currency and what the industry thinks sells. Real actors are artists, they're expressionists.

People who listen to my records expect the ballads from me. The rock 'n roll is on there because it's another mode of expression.

Good painting is nothing else but a copy of the perfections of God and a reminder of His painting. Finally, good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and with great difficulty.

I think I was just so ecstatic that I was working, and then as it went on, you know, I started to really appreciate that it ["Freaks and Geeks"] was good and that we were doing something a little different and that, you know, everyone was really cool to work with and that it was really talented group of people, and it was just when I was realizing that, that it got canceled.

I think furniture is art. I don't think art is just for your walls - I think everything that someone has made is a piece of art.

People asked me to change my name for [808s]...I think the fact that I can't sing that well is what makes "808s" so special.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

If I hear dance music, my body starts to move. Whatever the dance music is, I can't help it. With all that, I still felt, well, rock is a little higher art, but it wasn't. Right now, because I have so much experience with dance charts, I started to realize that it's incredible art. This is going to be known one day as high art.

Rock 'n' roll is meant to entertain. Hippie folk singers are supposed to be singing about leftist views, but I don't think rock 'n' roll was ever that way. I don't remember the early rock 'n' rollers ever expressing any political views.