Leon Battista Alberti Quotes

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

When you create stuff, you're always going to be progressing and where you're at a year down the line, as the creator, it's always going to feel immature. You're going to notice the flaws and the things that you've learned in that year aren't going to be there. So, I think it's important to see stuff as a capture of time - that's what I was doing at that time - and not be ashamed of it. That's how I try to approach music.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.

Art has to keep moving and discovering to stay alive.

Anyone who does anything creative is always gonna want to change.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

I take this art very seriously and passionately. I love what I do. You can't help but grow. That's not to say you don't make mistakes or make bad choices, but that's part of the art. Painters paint bad paintings.

I don't think I would have made 'Blank Project; if I hadn't made 'Cherry Thing.' I think that was a real rebirth in a way, and a remembrance of how I like to make music best, the most. Like being in a more chaotic place, maybe. Like a place of making and being creative where the mistakes can be left in.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

Music is always changing and the changes are unpredictable.

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.

We love it when we make mistakes that are better than something you could think up.

We're all works of art in progress.

There's a lot of brilliant comics who are amazing, but you can see them doing the same 20 minutes that they were doing five years ago, verbatim. I think that doesn't lend itself to progressing.

From a storytelling perspective, perfection is death.

I'm always going to be experimenting musically, trying new things.

Sometimes, mistakes are beautiful perfections.

Some of my best songwriting choices started as mistakes or learning curves, when I accidentally hit a 'wrong' key or something. I try not to lose that the more I learn the how's and why's of piano.

There'd be no merit to replicating something, to repeating something. As artists and as musicians, you wanna continue to go in different directions and develop.

Sometimes the best stories come from mistakes.

I made all sorts of things: drawings, sculptures - I was doing origami before I even knew the word. I was constantly creating.