Prince Quotes

I think that people respond to honesty in music, so I only choose songs that are the truth for me.

I would hate to make music and people love me for something that isn't me.

I want that every piece of art be honest, never mind what it is about.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

I don't feel comfortable making empty music.

I don't pretend anything anymore. I don't have time, desire or energy to calculate anymore.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

My music is going to be true. I'm not out to sell records. I'm experiencing something, and it's what I feel.

We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.

I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.

Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

The only people who have doubts about the sincerity of my music are people who come to it relatively late, off the back of having seen me in a film. Acting is about being other people, and music is about being myself.

I wanna make stuff that sonically sounds really good. I don't wanna make a song about how people think I'm this when I'm really that. I don't wanna make a song about how I grew up broke.

As long as it feels valid to me and feels sincere, I'll do what I do under the moniker of Nine Inch Nails if it's appropriate. I would hate to think I would ever be in a position where I'm faking it to get a paycheck.

My music, I feel, has always been experimental, but it had got to a point where I felt disconnected from it completely. I didn't want to be a Clark Kent/Superman: I couldn't really say, 'Well, B.o.B's the old me, and Bobby Ray's the new me.' I had to just make a point.

If it doesn't come from your heart, music just doesn't work.

I find that when I get on stage now, I don't want to perform a lot of my songs because they don't feel like me. So I want to make songs that are timeless.

I wear my heart on my sleeve, and whatever I was giving, it was just coming from my natural place at that time. And you know, some albums I've made, I look back and think they were great, and then some I look at, and I think that wasn't right at the time.

If you pretend to be somebody that you're not when you write songs - and I did that on some of the early Styx albums - nobody cares about what you have to say.

In this day and age, I really just don't want to sell people on something. I don't want to have to sell you sound. I don't like selling emotions. Or ideas. I just want to give you these ideas and inspire people.

As for my relationship to Beethoven, I admire people who can say what they really think. It's as though he's saying, 'That's how I feel about the world, and I don't care what people may say.' His music is pure and honest. Beethoven never pretends to be anybody else.

Growing up, I was listening to a ton of Motown music, Otis Redding, Aretha, and then there was the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. These were all people that I felt as though they truly felt every single lyric they said, and they weren't afraid of imperfection.

We didn't want to change who we are. We're not going to sit there and go, 'Let's be a rap band now.'

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.

You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.