Miles Davis Quotes

I'm making music with my friends. It's fun. It should be fun. You shouldn't make music if it isn't fun.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

When I think back now to the recording sessions, there is more improvisation than one hears. It's an ideal combination of arrangements and improvisation. Only a few people are able to listen and say what is composed and what is improvised. It's a unit.

I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

I'm very, very open to experimenting with different people and trying to find different methods of writing and making music.

I believe everything creative is somewhat collaborative. If you're a painter and someone stretches your canvas, it was collaborative on some level.

Music is supposed to be inspired.

I don't know what aids creativity. All I know is that it feels natural to hold a guitar in my hands and sing.

I don't think I could ever be in a band if we just had to go out there and play the record note for note. I'd give up. I'd become a banker.

If you read reviews of concerts, the word 'creative' comes up all the time. However, performers playing music usually aren't creative. Critics might say they are, but they're just playing another persons work. They didn't create it.

When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

When the muse hits me, or the mood, or whatever it is, I get my guitar out and I empty it out. I just start going through things to see what's going to happen.

Being a creative person. It's so much more rewarding when you find things on your own, to live whatever the writers are writing or to display what the director is looking for. You are the thing that everybody uses to get the story out.

When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.

I get to the point where I feel relaxed, and then I just shoot a ton of material and make a lot of different choices.

The movie industry is one big collaboration. Music gives me that freedom to create things straight from my heart and my mind.

To switch right into creativity usually takes a bit of time, and this came up right at that juncture where I thought, okay, here's an opportunity to work with somebody I really respect in a new medium.

Nothing in the whole world felt as good as being able to make something from a sudden idea.

Art to me was a state: it didn't need to be an accomplishment.

Do the thing itself. Don’t pay much mind to critics or what anyone says about it. Just do it, in any form possible, and watch others doing it. Take it in viscerally, get it by osmosis. Don’t ever read your own reviews, certainly not the good ones.

In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness.

Writing is like sex. The more you think about it, the harder it is to do. It's better not to think about it so much and just let it happen.