Creative Divergence Quotes

My father, whose work I adore... was down working on little things of grass and dead birds. Well, that didn't interest me. As an 8-year-old kid, I wanted knights in armor and so forth.

I know it sounds weird, but the kind of music I write isn't the kind of music that I listen to, which is quite underground, left-of-centre stuff like PJ Harvey and Tom Waits.

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought.

Was not a breakup, you know - is just going three different ways and sending the music in three different directions. Was just that my inspiration was growing, and my cup filled and runneth over... One man grow mango, another grow pear.

After Strapping, the amount of things in my life had changed were more than I'd ever had to process in any one time, and as a result of that, I found that my writing was veering off in four - sometimes even more - directions.

That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.

Every record we do there are always two camps. There's the camp that's like, "I love it. It sounds different than the last one." There are the people that are like, "I want it to sound like the last one." You can't please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.

I don't find much influence in opera. It was such a different part of me.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward.Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife.

The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

I have great respect for Brecht, but his path is not mine.