Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Follow your heart, and your pleasure in art. Don’t do what you think is going to be making you money, or what you’re parents want you to do, or what that beautiful girl or guy thinks you should be doing. Do what you love. It’s going to lead to where you want to go. Go out there and make the world more beautiful. I know you can.

I don't feel I have to be Jackson Browne. Still, I like to say something.

You know how they say, "Find your voice"? That's your voice, in your pajamas. And it doesn't mean that you're going to publish it or print it or people are going to see you in your pajamas. It just means you are going to construct the foundation in your pajamas, in that voice.

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self – the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.

Make sure that everything you produce and create is organic to you.

My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.

I've learnt that I've had the best results from just trying to be me, trying to make a movie or TV show I want to see or write a script I want to read, and that's really all I can offer - being authentic.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.

My biggest challenge was to make sure that the songs I did were who I am.

My work is intensely personal.

The most important thing for me as an artist is having an identity.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction - they're always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

I wanted to create a body of work that I was proud of. It's come from honesty and integrity, without forcing anything from myself, the ideas had to come instinctively and organically. Whether that translates to people in that way, it's kind of out of my hands now.

You can only make the film that's in you.

Writing is about bringing something from inside you that you're trying to say, and not just trying to say something to please someone else.

The process of writing and creating and answering that very unique call inside yourself has nothing to do with agents and sales and all that stuff.

I've never been about just trying to do what works. I've been about trying to authentically express how I feel.

I don't even really try to do something different. I just do what's authentic to me.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.

To live is to express, and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. To live is to express oneself freely in creation.

You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.