Todd Rundgren Quotes

It's a completely different way of working when you have your own place for recording. It's like if you were a painter, and you do loads of painting, and you just pick which paintings you want to exhibit. It's a much nicer, freer way of making work; you're not limited to anything, and you can make these cool, weird little albums.

Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.

Painters aren't expected to paint bleak pictures, are they?

My knock with filmmaking is the whole bureaucracy around it, so in some ways, staying outside of it is easier for me.

I don't have to put out another rap record. I can do it at my casual pace.

As a painter you're responsible yourself, 100 percent. In film, you have the editor, the director, the other actors. It has the advantage of not being solitary.

From the moment I got to Hollywood, I've always felt like I never really got to do what I wanted to do. In general, artists feel that you're never really allowed to accomplish what you would like to accomplish because there's just so much of this system that gets in the way; the business gets in the way of the art.

I realized if I'm not really making an album, I don't have to be concerned about things like stylistic consistency, pacing, a coherent mood. All that stuff goes out the window.

As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I'll fit whatever I'm trying to say around a melody.

I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.

Anytime you put yourself in a creative box, it's going to stifle you; it's not conducive to the writing or recording process.

If you are any competent musician, if you have creative ideas, ideas of songs, of arrangements, in a band like the Stones, where these 2 people do all the things, there is no freedom.

The chance to work on Broadway choreography as opposed to having to deliver Broadway choreography can be two distinct things.

When I go with different producers, and they've thought about what they want to do, I think they feel a little bit more free, because they know almost any sound will work on my record if we pull it together properly - so they don't feel so limited.

I like television, but there's not as much freedom as there is in film or theatre, and I always felt that there is a certain pressure in being able to put out a product, but it's OK.

I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.

In a book, you can describe a scene and have any song you want playing on the radio and have any painting you want hanging on the wall. That was really freeing to me when I was writing 'Ready Player One.' I could throw in everything that I love.

The plan is to keep on putting out records until someone shows up and tells us to stop.

To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, 'Oh I made the wrong choice,' which is a recurring nightmare I have.

I no longer enjoy drawing people's pets. I just want to draw what I want to draw and have people not tell me what to draw.

I always say that improvisation is the utterance of one's spirit, and it dictates your life experience, and that's how you find your concepts and your way for painting your musical picture.

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

I think filmmaking should be a wonderfully free collaborative process, and it so very rarely is. I often see directors as jailers of my talent.

If you do an indie film, where it's like, "We don't have a lot of money to give you, but we'll really give you a lot of freedom," that's really a luxury to have in this business. At least for myself, because I'm still kind of earning my acting credibility.

There are so many rules about play writing. I'd have a nervous breakdown if I followed them.