Artistic Priority Quotes

I don't regard myself as a soloist. It's a color; I put it in for excitement. It's not great loss if a solo has to go. We've made songs without solos.

I like to see myself as a composer first and only then as a singer.

I had parents in the business and they made sure that the art was the biggest concern.

I never care personally what people say about me. The music, and the message - this will always be more important to me than people thinking I'm the best.

The subject comes first, the medium second.

There are certain functions that a writer has to do. In a time of crisis, it is great to have heroic poems, as it was in the Irish Revolution. It's great to have great songs, because people need something to sing when they are marching. That's OK, but it should be on the side. It's not the ultimate thing.

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.

I've been in situations where someone has told me that my video made them uncomfortable. This was a straight man, and I really don't want to have to worry about making him uncomfortable. I should really be worrying about my own comfort and me putting out the best art that I can.

It's always the music first for me. But if the music isn't selling, there isn't gonna be no business. So you gotta make sure music is always the first priority.

The meaning of the words in my songs are very important to me. But what's most important to me is that the music works.

I'm a poet first and foremost, before the modelling.

My concern 99% is about the storytelling, the emotion and all this. I never think about the format of anything until way far in the process and when we arrive to the fabrication of the thing then we start to say, "Okay right, what is the best thing we can do." I choose the car before to choose the color.

It's a little bit more like I want to give this to the people that are really into it first - I don't have a lot of desire to be like Bon Jovi or something like that, I really want to concentrate on the music.

I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.

This industry's so full of distractions: partying, drinking, sex, money. The priority for me is just to make music that people can connect with. I want to make something fresh that people may not understand

I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page.

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

Before I even pick up a guitar, usually the words are done. So I'm not first and foremost a musician. I'm first and foremost a writer.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

I've always wanted to do my best to make sure it's clear that I want to keep the focus on my music.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Only the human figure exists; landscape is, and should be, no more than an accessory; the painter exclusively of landscape is nothing but a bore.

As an artist, I will always give art more importance and preference than pure entertainment.

The drive to create music that is pure is my highest priority. Sometimes I'll get extremely technical, and other times I'll just kind of go with the gods of music.

Whenever I work on an album and the time comes to do all the artwork, the only thing I think of is the LP artwork. When we worked on the 'Electric Trim' artwork, we spent weeks and weeks making the LP artwork great, and then the CD artwork came together in a day or two. The LP is what's important to me.