Sheryl Crow Quotes

I've never worried about how a new release will be received. I simply try to do the best I can and leave the rest to the gods. The music industry in those terms is something I loathe and detest. It conjures up images of a gigantic factory spewing out parts of the machine.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

As an artist, I don't care about where we are in the charts and all that. The important thing to me is to connect with a creative project.

Corporations have steered the industry into what it wants, and a lot of times they will make artists record what it wants or to make songs talk to who they want to talk to. But sometimes the heart and the head have to be able to talk and deal with a situation that's evident.

The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.

There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio. You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard, like Chuck D said.

I'm not an industry artist - I'm an artist in the industry.

The one thing about being a creator, about being an artist, is that you get to explore your ideas. We're fortunate that we're in the position to do that, and I don't take it for granted.

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved.

The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.

My songs are like kids. I love them all. I encourage them to grow, to reach their full potential, and then send them out into the world.

My dream is to do exactly what I'm doing. I love writing and directing, and being somebody that can write about an artist I love or make a film about it. That's great. I would leave the other stuff to those who do it much better.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.

The artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience, even though the majority of his audience may prefer to remain fixed in their old perceptual attitudes.

Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.

I'm one of those actors who says, "Point me toward the work that matters to me and I don't care where you're putting it. Television show. Movie. Projected on the back of someone's garage." If that's where the work is that's exciting to me and moving, I want to be there.

I'm an artist first and foremost. So things are gonna go up and down and sideways and whichever way all through life.

I can't speak for what other artists should do. I can only tell you how I live.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

Some artists are told what to like and told definitions of what the music business is. That's a problem. Music is artistry, and you want your music heard, your act known. But artists don't know. They are ignorant the minute they sign a contract.

I would give the cameras to the kids in the swimming pools and they would play with them, and then I would collect them and we would upload it. If you're in the process, you're there.

I just close my eyes and act like I'm a 3-year-old. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.

Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world.