Alexander McQueen Quotes

Learn all the rules... then break them.

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.

What people don't realize is that when you start making things outside of the convention of what is normal or good or 'best practices,' you're also shedding some of the baggage that comes with the concept of what a game 'should' be.

You've got to know the rules to break them.

Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

I never imagined myself doing a one-man show. If I'm going to do one, I'd rather do one that breaks all the rules.

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

I like surprising myself. I don't want to do the norm, do what I'm always known to do, write how I like to write.

To be able to create fully, it's maybe fine that you learn the rules, but you have to forget and to rebel against those rules.

If no one ever broke the rules, then we'd never advance.

I like people who push the envelope.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

Always be different; don't follow the rules. Don't do what anyone tells you. Don't use the same sounds as people; don't use the same drums as people.

People think that when they're playing it safe, they're trying to preserve what they have, but there is no preservation of what you have in music. There's no safety in music.

To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new.

Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way.

I guess I much prefer the path of the contrarian: the guy who goes against the grain a bit. The careers of the people who I admire deeply - like the Coen brothers and Soderbergh - don't repeat themselves, and they make radically different films at times, and I think that's wonderful.

We have no precedents to guide us, and that is a glorious thing, for precedents, like other guides are disposed to grow tyrannical and refuse to let us do anything on our own initiative. Life grows wearisome in the countries where precedents and conventionality is rule and nothing can happen unless it has happen before.

What makes our world so fascinating is that continuously there are novel and creative ideas spurring people to leave old ways and try something new.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

If you are not breaking rules and you are not taking risks, you are not going to end up with movies where there is discovery... and, to me, that is the magic of going into the cinema.

I'm trying to do different music, and I'm trying to be out of the box.

When you think 'Peaky Blinders,' when it first began it got mixed reviews and people didn't know what to do with it, and it was like: 'Why is there modern music on this?' So I think whenever you do something different you're going to get that response.