Joaquin Phoenix Quotes

I think I have allowed my voice to experiment with the different genres. And I think that I have just really enjoyed the journey of getting to know my voice and seeing what it's capable of, what it's not capable of.

For singers, our singing voice is our natural voice, not the speaking.

I just really need to sing and sing and sing and not worry about writing. Just by singing for pleasure, your voice takes you to what it wants to sing. And that is how the best stuff kind of emerges.

I'm kind of still learning my voice and learning my style.

I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?

I didn't know what kind of sound I wanted to make. I didn't have no influences. I just heard my voice in the microphone and was like, damn, I like that.

I found my own voice slowly. I don't do big tricks like Mariah Carey, so I've found this weird way of singing that works for me.

Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.

Your music essentially reflects everything you do, everything you've been through, in the deepest part of you.

Finding places to perform was definitely the biggest challenge. Trying to find my voice over the years was a big thing because when I started I was just doing characters and impressions and that was it.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

You know how they say, "Find your voice"? That's your voice, in your pajamas. And it doesn't mean that you're going to publish it or print it or people are going to see you in your pajamas. It just means you are going to construct the foundation in your pajamas, in that voice.

It's very easy I think when you're a creative person to wait for the right thing and to start getting self-conscious about how you are going to express what you do and what's special about you. I would say in general, a lot of times the answer is that you just dive into something and you find your own voice through that process.

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.

If I was singing like somebody else, then it was almost like I was expressing myself like somebody else. So it was always a very original thing for me. It's my voice, it's my diary, it's the way I connect with people.

I'm a piano player. I never thought of myself as a singer, at all. I was always trying to sound like somebody else. I don't like my own voice, I like Ray Charles, Robert Plant, I like Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, people that have an edge in their voice.

I was trying to do something that seemed very natural and easy but which bridged that gulf between the singing voice and the speaking voice.

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

It doesn’t feel natural for me to write some diary type song. I want to write a classic like Yesterday but weird songs about meatballs in refrigerators come into my head – I can’t help it.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.

If you want to say something profound, writing from your heartbeat is different than writing from the loud voices you get from music. If they're rapping from noise, it's about robbing people. It's that simple.