Rza Quotes

I love making music, but if you make something that inspires somebody else to make something, without getting too airy-fairy, you've contributed to the zeitgeist in some way, and that's just an amazing feeling.

I always hope that my music can inspire someone, the same way other artists inspire me.

My goal in my career is to inspire people, is to get my music out there and have people enjoy it, and have people think of me as an inspirational artist.

My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.

The most valiant thing you can do as an artist is inspire someone else to be creative.

Crumb was such an influence on me. He's such a visionary, such a great artist, that he so shaped my artistic sensibilities on a certain level that I do owe everything to him. The way I see the world is largely changed by him.

But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness.

Great art inspires great art.

The point is that the arts are important enough to have influenced the greatest minds and talents we know. Albert Einstein said that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician.

Three 6 Mafia have been around for a long time; we've made a lot of music. Anybody's music can influence anybody. I've heard people say that our music has influenced such and such, and it could be true, and it could not.

I always feel like it is a privilege to be able to be an artist and to be able to exhibit my work all over the world.

An artist's sphere of influence is the world.

You never know when what you do in the arts means something to people, and you never really know if you've been received well.

I don't know if I actually respect other artists as people as much as I should. I look at their work as excellent data that feeds my mind as nature feeds my body.

I always been inspired and aspire to inspire through the music. I feel like I've always made the soundtrack to a movement.

I was really inspired, working with Odd Future.

I leave everyone to have their own opinions of my music and my influence - or not - on others.

We feel it's really interesting to see how our music translates to such a broad audience.

The one artist who actually had influence over me was Bo Bartlett.

That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

I think one of the greatest compliments I've ever received was when a young kid came backstage at Joe's Pub, when I had the "Bronx In Blue" album out. He said, "What Jimmy Reed did for you, you do for me."

The ideas get under your skin. I am honored and deeply excited by the thought that the next generation of writers, or whomever, are influenced by these books.

As soon as anybody does one of my songs, I rejoice. This particular case of all these great singers doing my work - the implications are very rich and the temptation to think of the outcome of these masses of the mainstream injecting my work into the marketplace, it's a very sweet speculation.

I'm usually the last to see my influence in other people's work. People give me stuff and say "Oh look, this guy's ripping you off," and I'm like "What do you mean?" Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another artist.