Nicola Roberts Quotes

I think 'Hamilton' has made me look at myself deeper as an artist and what I'm looking for as an artist.

There are entertainers and there are musicians, and I never was an entertainer.

Sometimes I do feel like I write the same story again and again. And for me, I am always looking for a place with a kind of redemption.

You go where you think it's good for your work and your soul to go. I need to go someplace where I am reminded about why I wanted to act in the first place, and for me, that's the theater.

I realized that I wanted to get better in every way. As a person, as a friend, as a songwriter, as a musician, as an artist, record producer, you name it.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

I found I am not an anarchistic form creator; I'm intuitive, and I'm trying to figure out a way to explore human fragility.

I had a lot of songs and words and scenes stuck inside of me. So Jacknife encouraged me to bring them all out. So, in essence, 'You and Others' is my diary.

I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need.

It's really such a personal journey, making a record, but even more so writing the songs.

I wrote lyrics that were intensely personal to me a few years ago. Maybe people know me better now.

I never feel like I need to make a song that sells 5 million copies; that's not the point of why I make music. It's great if that happens, like it did with 'Clarity,' but my goal is to always make a better track than the last one.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.

I can't play anything until I find something that connects to my life, something I can carry as my secret map or code for the character.

A lot of my building blocks - who I am kind of as an artist - all came from being in L.A.

Working on solo material is something I had always dreamed of doing, and I'm incredibly happy with the results. 'Everything To Me' is a very personal song to me lyrically; it is such an upbeat and optimistic record, perfect for the summer. I can't wait for people to hear it!

By the time I hit college, my secret shame was the reason I was an actor was my own words sort of dried up. I stopped writing. I stopped being able to form my own vision. That's actually what my first feature is about - looking back at two different selves.

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.

I really think I've found me finally in the music. You know, I had put an album out before, 'Embrace Me,' and it's been seven years since that. So I was discovering who I was. And I still am discovering, but I think now I know a little bit more of who I am. So that's what's pushing me.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I'm proud of.

Sometimes I'm not even aware of some of the issues going on with me in my life until I sit down and start kind of looking for inspiration, trying to find something that inspires that creativity.

'Honey' was the first song I wrote where I was really enjoying myself again after questioning the idea of being an artist.

For me to get up and feel the urge to go to the set and all that, I have to feel there is something tremendously vibrating to achieve there. I need to lose sometimes a consciousness of the person and the reality in order to be happy to come back into the reality and happier to live it for this cause, to be an artist in this life.

There was a stage in my career when I started to have problems with the vanity aspect of the subject. I got frustrated and bored with it. Then I thought, actually, how does it feel to be photographed? That's when I started to photograph myself. That was an incredibly important moment, and it opened up my work tremendously.