Jacob Collier Quotes

I love acting, but music is so much more rewarding because it's more personal.

If I'm in something that I think is kinda good, it stays with me like a fever dream for a long time afterwards. I don't recall the finished product so much as the feeling of making it.

An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond... a good feeling about his art.

People still call me the eternal amateur. After all, professionals are supposed to be able to conduct everything. But I can't unless I feel some connection inside. Conducting is not an end in itself for me.

One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

I started producing work with an ecstatic addiction.

For me writing and acting all comes out of the same place, a compulsion to review and connect to something. For me they are more similar than different.

I've had so much positive reaction and emotional fulfillment from the creation of my art and sharing it with everyday people that I never paid too much attention to the opinion of critics.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

The problem is that music is selfish in that you need to make it for yourself, so that you can give it away, and those two things don't jive. I needed to find the right reason to play that had the magic and mystery and excitement that made me want to play in the first place.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

I don't make art to make money, I make art so I can make art.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

You definitely do not do films for that particular reason. You do them for yourself, for your satisfaction of creating this thing with characters and watching these characters take on real life - that's all you care about.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

I'll go on making films until I make one that pleases me from the first to the last frame. Then I'll quit.

Music is supposed to be entertaining and if it touches you emotionally, so much the better. Sometimes you do it to save your own life, not anybody else's. That's why I write. I'm not trying to change anybody else's life or the world, I'm trying to keep from blowing my own brains out. That's the real point.

The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.

As an artist, I think it's critical for keeping yourself alive that you try to get your hands into something a little bit more intensely. It's one of the reasons why I love theater because you never actually let go of it and it never feels like there's a tremendous distance between the process and the product.

I guess the most emotional part is when I have that moment when I end up writing something that I really, really love. So not only is there the emotional connection with the music that's being created, but there's also the magic of the fact that you're essentially creating something from nothing.