A. R. Rahman Quotes

It's a great honor when somebody takes your song and does something different with it. That's what music is all about: to constantly change what somebody else has done.

Well, you might as well imitate your own program because if you don't, someone else will.

There will be no new music until it's good enough and until I'm ready.

Now everybody's sampling.

My father was my first inspiration. He had an incredible stereo and a turntable, and I was told not to touch it. But I'd go back and touch it anyway. I gained a respect for the turntables when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I came up with a 'cueing system' to work the turntables because they didn't have it at that time.

'White Rabbit' was mostly done in about two days, the music in about half an hour. The music is a 'Bolero' rip-off and the lyrics a rearrangement of 'Alice in Wonderland.' You take two spectacular hits and throw them together, and it's hard to miss.

If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.

I don't know, samples are just like unlimited ideas, you know? Sometimes a lot of people sample one song. A lot of it is also really just up to the artist and their creativity to see where it goes and what they want to do.

When I do a remix, I try to think about what I don't have in my bag and create something to fill that gap.

I think one of the reasons that we are able to actually keep making music that we want to make, and that we're inspired by, is because there is a certain amount of instability constantly, and I think that mirrors the instability of any given life.

Like in comedy, you know the names of the people who steal things that others work really hard on. It really sucks. And, in magic, it's not just the hard work of getting the words and attitude and point of view right; you're taking an actual invention, making something over three or four years, and somebody can just take it.

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction...All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland...I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around...Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.

I knew the Beatles songs and how influential they are to other bands, but I'm not a fanatic, so I could look outside the box and observe.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear-all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward.

I had a $1.50 from playing the ukulele after owning it seven minutes. I thought, "Hmmm, this has some possibilities."

Music & Fashion; it all comes from the same place of creativity.

Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity.

Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.

My hope is to continue to make new music and go with the flow. I think I'll always be creative. I want to keep making good music, put myself into positions where I need to rise to the occasion of playing in front of an audience, and continually get better at what I'm doing.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

I smoked this joint and then it hit me. I thought, what you gotta do is play your own simply blues.

Life is marvelous now because I have a tape recorder.