Max Roach Quotes

I want to be the kind of artist who keeps pushing on every album. I don't want to settle on a sound.

I'm a more skilled writer now, but after 23 books it's harder to be fresh and that's really important to me. I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.

When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

Some artists are happy doing the same thing again and again, but my favorite artists are the ones who evolve and grow, and I want to be one of them.

If people respect us as artists, they know we'll give them something different every time; they know we're pushing ourselves.

That's one of the problems in being a songwriter and living a long time. What you eventually end up doing is you start imitating yourself.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

The thing you start noticing as books go by, is that you become aware not only of a shape of a career, but of your themes and interests. You don't want writing tricks where you make the same joke every time, but you do start to notice what consumes your mind, or what drives you.

Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

When someone writes something dazzlingly brilliant, people want to imitate it. The result is a lot of less-than-brilliant knock-offs. Elves, Dwarves, Goblin army, cursed ring, evil sorcerer. Tolkien did it. It rocked. Let's move on. Let's do something new.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

It's not like I'm not writing great music anymore, it's just that I want to take it another level.

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

When I start to write a song, I initially fall into patterns and creative habits that are familiar, and because they're familiar, they sound convincing. It's important for me to not pursue those ideas, because I've already done them, but to find ideas that are different and feel strange to write and disconcerting to write.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

When I'm writing a book, I draw from my immediate experience, and my books are therefore almost a snapshot of where I am at that moment in my life.

I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book, Max on Life; for many it just never gets published. All I did was collect a few of the questions I've been asked through the years, write up a brief response and put them in this publication.

For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.