Jeff Buckley Quotes

Everything that an artist does is a risk. Some people want you to stay the same. If you want to evolve, they want to keep you in a certain place.

I'm seen as a little risky to the industry, I think. All my favorite directors are.

You don't know what the country is ready for unless you're pushing that envelope, and I was told that I couldn't develop 'Will and Grace'.

I've always enjoyed doing challenging things and also challenging common wisdom.

My whole career is based on taking a left turn after each film and doing the opposite of what I've just done.

When I've worked with established artists, I've naturally been more restricted, but you still have to take risks and push yourself to do something different.

Well, every movie is an experiment. And the only way you can grow at what you're doing is to take chances. You can't try to stick with what worked last time.

I guess I much prefer the path of the contrarian: the guy who goes against the grain a bit. The careers of the people who I admire deeply - like the Coen brothers and Soderbergh - don't repeat themselves, and they make radically different films at times, and I think that's wonderful.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.

The minute someone says 'Oh God, you could never do that; you can't get that kind of stuff on the air'...that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

I think every album you have to stretch further and further, give people another piece of you. But then I always try to deviate from the norm.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

I believe that a creative career is only as good as the risks that you take with it.

Some people might be groomed for success; I've just always thought I've got a hell of a lot of things to learn and places to go. Creatively, I couldn't stay on the same treadmill. I chose to be off-centre and do collaborative work.

I'm attracted to seeing how different I can be, pushing the boat out.

I am not doing comedy because the genre is successful. If that was the case, I would have done a run-of-the-mill comedy film. I set my own trends. I like to give something new and different to my audiences. I want to do the kind of comedy that has been missing till now.

It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely.

Hip-hop can be limiting and I refuse to accept limits.

I'm proud that with 'Bright Eyes' we've always experimented and tried to make a different record every time out.

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.

It's been the work that has carried me and I never wanted to rest on my laurels or go back and do what I done before.

A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them.

Never try to make the same record twice, even when people are screaming for the same sound.

All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it's a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.