Creative Expression Quotes

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

I just used to go to the same auditions with all these other kids I went to school with. I didn't feel like I was really good at acting. I didn't feel like I was a really talented person that needed to be doing this.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

I come from a creative background, and everything I enjoy is entertaining or playing music for people, which is the exact thing the Community restricts and opposes. At least still playing games with the kids and being active, not completely awful.

Cinema is not just a side show - it is something which is much deeper than that. It is a form of art which needs to be respected.

The very function of creativity, of the elaboration of the human condition only enlarges the human spirit and, I mean, as a writer I don't want to read political literature all the time. It would be terribly boring and, you know, abrasive, but just reading the insights, you know, partaking of the insights of a writer into phenomena, into society, into human relationships, both on a micro level and on a macro level, is already a function.

It is true that everything has been said, but not everyone has said it.

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

The joy of working at something to find out what it means to me is what I grew up with.

Acting is therapeutic.

Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.

The Japanese fans always send weird things.

If you consider yourself a part of the culture, then finances can't allow you to be bigger than the actual art form.

Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.

perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.

I think sometimes when people start doing improv there's some regression towards trying to replicate the "good" improvisers that they've read about in their improv books or heard about from their teachers. That's understandable, because they're trying to learn technique and stuff, but I actually think that my favorite performers are ones who have unique improv technique but also have a unique point of view that you can feel with them and their performances.

When movement isn't enough, you dance, or when speaking isn't enough, you sing. When it's organic, and it's earned like that in a musical, that's when it works, and then there's nothing like it because it's this thing that takes you to a whole 'nother level, you know?

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It's like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn't any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.

There were certainly more conventional and predictable paths that I could have taken in life, but I believe in being true to oneself and following the thing that sets your soul on fire. For me, that is music.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

I just being able to write songs I'm proud of and finding some women to play with is exciting.

Songwriting is such a personal thing and it's hard to be in a room with somebody you don't know and trust.