Creative Rebirth Quotes

I lived in a cabin in the woods in Oregon, and I'd basically given up on the music industry for an indefinite amount of time. And while I was out there, I came up with a very specific vision of what I wanted my music to sound like.

'Stillmatic' is the rebirth of 'Illmatic,' my first debut album to come out in 1994. 'Stillmatic' is me coming full circle in my career and with everything, and just bringing pure hip-hop back.

I've been around a long time and I've found that these forms, whether it's the cartoon, or whether it's a play, or all these dying forms refuse to die. Something happens to rejuvenate them and it will certainly happen to the political cartoon. It will come back. But whether it's on the internet, or whether it's in some other form, however that works, whether it looks the way it looks now, or entirely different, I have no idea. And thank God I don't have to worry about it.

'The Slap' is not like anything else. It's an incredibly well-written novel that has been turned into a great and intriguing series that reveals both less and more about each character than you learn in the book. It's a novel that has been given a second chance to live.

You have to go away to come back. That's just normal. That's with bands, actors, comedians, everything.

I'm like Madonna: I keep reinventing myself.

[After Easy Rider] I couldn't get another movie, so I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years. I lived in Paris for a couple of years. I didn't take any photographs, and then I went to Japan and saw a Nikon used. I bought it, and I just started, like an alcoholic. I shot 300 rolls of film. That was the beginning of me starting again.

I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm now in the business of making spiritual records and using my voice for that purpose. I'm not going to be singing songs that I made in the past. I closed the door on that incarnation of Sinead O'Connor.

I had to learn my faith and look after my family, and I had to make priorities. But now I've done it all and there's a little space for me to fill in the universe of music again.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think it's really important to remake things. If you never remake the classics, no one would know Shakespeare.

I'm John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.

I've watched too many artists in my life forget how good the things they used to do were.

I've been really happy just traveling and being Mrs. Johnny Cash all these years. But I'm also really happy and surprised that someone wanted me to make another album, and I'm real proud of what I've done.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

With each new album: I need to kill the last version of me.

I am racing to the studio the moment that God affords me the opportunity to hear again.

The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

Actors are always afraid of ending up like overcooked old soup over time. What's risky is that you don't realize this has happened, and you just get thick and boring. Going abroad was like getting a new pot to cook everything again. I was a rookie, a new self. And they were asking me, 'Who are you?'

A good idea is never lost. Even though its originator or possessor may die, it will someday be reborn in the mind of another.