Chris Ofili Quotes

Change is incremental. Change is small.

You can perform all kind of characters but you cannot change what people feel for you.

If you come every day or every month to my studio, you won't see that much change, but if you come once a year, you'll see big new categories opened up.

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.

I was stuck with the dark glasses. They took all these pictures that went around the world. I guess once you become successful, you don't want to change anything too drastically.

I know that change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that it is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten.

I like to break down barriers and I think that Hollywood is doing the same thing over and over. I want to do something new and say, "Let's evolve as artists!"

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

What ends up happening is people form images and the image they form is, in some ways, what they want it to be. The idea of trying to correct the image is something I'm not interested in doing.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

First of all, I'm not a heartthrob. If you saw me in high school, you wouldn't say I'm a heartthrob. Having a hit song, the minute you're famous, you're a heartthrob. I know you don't believe me, but I honestly don't consider myself a heartthrob.

We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

People will know you for whatever they want to know you for.

When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesquemoments experienced by its heroes.... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow.

I talked to George Lucas once, not about Star Wars. Everyone wants to talk to him about Star Wars, and I didn't want to be one of those people. In person - at least on this occasion - he wasn't effervescent and giddy, as the Star Wars movies are. He's more focused.

It's not like you get up in the morning on the first day of shooting and say, 'I'm so smart today I'm going to determine every choice I make from now until a year and a half from now.' So it changes. You gain insights. The movie bucks you.

I'm frequently introduced as a fashion designer, and I quickly say I'm not, and instantly people are incredibly disappointed and think that I'm some sort of charlatan who's been perpetuating this falsehood.

The secret of showmanship consists not of what you really do, but what the mystery-loving public thinks you do.

I like to think that I've gotten better at what I do. I spend more time and pay more attention to detail album after album. But pretty much it's stayed the same.

I don't care about anybody's perception of me except for the audience.

I always hesitate when people call me a musician.I have had no musical training. I can't play anything. I really think of myself as a performer. It's always been writing for me. I evolved with my band in rock 'n' roll through poetry, not through music.