Taiye Selasi Quotes

Anybody who dedicates himself to exploring the human condition, there's always a detached eye that's watching. In any situation, a little part of me is observing it, to see if there are any raw materials to create something else later.

I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.

Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you're taught as a medical doctor. We're supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I'm able to integrate those two.

Any rehearsal process - I find, anyway - does have quite an effect on me, and I very much live in that world for the whole period of time that I'm involved with the production. But normally, afterwards with a little bit of space, I can come right back out of it again.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

I think anything emotional adds to your acting and singing, no matter what it is that you go through. It will always add to it, never take away.

Music is an emotional experience, and that is what imprints itself on the soul. And I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion.

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

I get emotionally attached with every film I do, and that stops me from being critical. I can't fight my emotions.

I've always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content of a song lies. Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people.

Knowledge is death in my experience. The more I know about film, the harder it is to create freely.

I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind.

Songwriting isn't always something that's directly proportionate to the experience.

I write my songs and just play them, so there are not a whole lot of fireworks. As long as the music comes first, it's OK to have some fireworks. But not the other way around.

Focus on your music and not technology.

Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it.

I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.

I am less instinctive as I try to be more professional - about the music, about the sound.