Devin Townsend Quotes

It's impossible to recreate music from the past. Music always states the truth.

I don't think songs have to be like these super-#1-smash-hit-sounding songs, because I think it's more important that it's like, 'Hey! This is coming out of me. This is something I connect with. This is something that I like to sing.'

There is something powerful in Metallica, a will, a drive.

If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth.

Death metal uses a lot of white face paint and black hair dye to make its point. I quite enjoy this genre for its intensity, extremism and underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it.

To be a songwriter-singer means the songs come from deep within, and you treat them as an artist, with that much respect. I couldn't hardly cheat myself.

Johnny Winter doesn't know the word 'subtlety.' But it works, it works.

Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.

My music is pretty honest. I can't rap on science fiction. Punk is from the street.

All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.

Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity.

For a guy who didn't expect a fan base whatsoever, I'm pretty stoked. People say they don't understand it, and I say that's okay. I don't think anyone can argue that I'm not trying to do my own thing at least.

I developed a pretty unusual style, I think.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

Art: to nudge truth along a little.

Most ferocious was Kobe. Fiercest, most competitive, it was Kobe. D Wade is second after that.

So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first-and all this for trifles that no man really needs!

Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.