Gilbert O'Sullivan Quotes

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.

I want to be an artist you cannot categorize at all. You can't put a box around me. You can't put anything around me.

Artists are traditionally resistant to labels.

I've told people before that I don't want to be a part of a genre; I want to be my own genre. I want to create it.

I always felt like an outsider of the industry, and now I feel quite comfortable as an independent artist.

It's really tough to make a name for yourself without compromising and without fitting yourself into a real specific mold. When I made the choice that I would be involved in every aspect of music and not necessarily make music for radio or MTV, I was saying, 'OK, this is me. You decide who it is.'

I've always done everything at my disposal to avoid labeling what I do, or to avoid being labeled myself.

I guess I created LeRoy Neiman. Nobody else told me how to do it. Well, I'm a believer in the theory that the artist is as important as his work.

I hate the idea that I have to represent any particular section of society; I just write good telly, that's all.

I want to be remembered as somebody that tried to respect her integrity as an artist and as a person. And I don't want to be in any box. I don't want to be one thing.

Art school had taught me it was far better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I'm ahead or behind the curve, that's for others to decide.

I don't like to be labeled, to be anything. I've made the mistake before myself of labeling my music, but it's counter-productive.

I don't like being put in a box. I just make music, you know?

Like most creative people I don't fit well into boxes.

I dislike when people try to pigeonhole me, when all I want is to do good work.

I'd just like to inspire people to be themselves and do what they want and not conform to the rigid guidelines of the music or entertainment business.

I don't want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself. I want to avoid becoming too styled and too 'done' and too generic. You see people as they go through their career, and they just become more and more like everyone else.

So many actors and musicians seem to be only interested in what's expected of them, and they join the dots accordingly. I don't fit into any narrow categories as an actor or a singer.

I want to be free to be any version of me I feel like being. I don't want to be McDonald's that serves the same food every time.

People often say, 'You don't go to fashion shows? What kind of photographer are you? What the hell is the wrong with you, man?' But that's what I need in order to be who I am.

An artist has to be selfish; otherwise, he's not true to his own art.

I'm a creative person, and I'm gonna be creative, so whoever's upset because of that, that's too bad.

I think people sometimes have a hard time placing me because I don't fit into a box. When they ask what I do at a cocktail party, I either say I'm a Renaissance woman or I'm a high-level madam. Lately I've been more comfortable saying I'm an artist, because that can cover a lot of different things.