Genre Constraints Quotes

I don't feel like I should just be a rapper. That's boring to me.

I hate when I get pinned down to a genre. I have a sound, a lane I want to go down, but I never want to be stuck in my song choices.

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

A long time ago, I stopped trying to look at projects as genre exercises.

I think it's a bit like saying a painter does a painting everyone loves and it's 40% blue paint, so from now on you have to paint paintings that are 40% blue. That's the film industry at its most blunt, which is why it's constantly bats and spiders and superheroes.

If you write in category, you write knowing there's a framework, there are reader expectations.

When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.

Being singer/songwriter implies versatility and being able to create more than one medium, and R&B artist is a box, simple as that. It is 'that's what you do, that's what you are', and that's a little unfair, to me, because I don't just do that. So I like singer/songwriter because it allows me to move a little bit more freely.

To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.

In 'Bojack,' at least at first, we had to couch some of the sadder or weirder or introspective stuff we were doing in the costume of a typical adult animated comedy. With 'Undone,' it felt like we'd outgrown that expectation.

I was really into Black Sabbath, but heavy guitars can really be very limiting, it's a great frequency and it's great fun to listen to but on the other hand, musically you can do a lot more without it.

The thing is that my first novel, which was basically a mystery adventure story, won quite an important award in Spain for young adult fiction, and because of this it became a very successful book, and right now it's some sort of a standard title, it's read widely in many high schools in Spain, so I think, in a way, I was a victim of my own success in the field of young adult fiction, because it was never my own natural register. I never intended to write that kind of fiction, but I became very successful at it.

One of the mistakes I made was believing that the rock n' roll genre as a genre was much more free than the whole pop or R&B scene.

The first Amy Silver book was commissioned, and they were not books that came completely from me. They weren't necessarily the sort of books I read, and although I enjoyed doing them very much, and they were great training, I never felt completely comfortable in that genre.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

I don't want to go to a foreign country and get lumped into that genre. I'm just looking at the bigger picture. This K-pop title might be good for now, but looking ahead it could hold me back, like a prison of sort. I'm a little wary about that.

What I don't like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

When people talk about how parameters can generate really good work, there's no better example than working within a genre in film. That's like the ultimate parameter.

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

After 10 years, I have been touring for 20, playing basically the same type of music, a four-piece or three-piece type of music with loud, crashing drums and screaming vocals. It gets to the point where you're looking for something new, and you don't want to do something that's way too left-field, for fear that it might seem contrived.

I'm dying to play a nice guy! No one's willing to cast me. They know I'm all right at bashing people up, but they don't know if I can do the other stuff. And I can.

This genre of music seems to want to push people into a certain time slot, which is unfortunate.

I don't want to be held down by genres so much.