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Artist Quotes


"I've been compared to hundreds of artists, which just goes to show you that I'm not any one thing at all."


"It's nice to get a response from the artists that I cover."



"David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters."


"Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique."


"I see myself as an artist who happens to do cartoons."


"My function at Verve was that of a genuine producer in artists and repertoire."


"Artists are very young, and say, Um, ok, to these industry dudes."


"I'm a big fan of '70s records where artists could draw on whatever influences they wanted."


"Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works."


"I didn't really think about becoming a professional artist until high school, when I realized that everything else required too much math."


"My parents always saw me as an artist, and that greatly influenced me."


"No matter what as an artist that's always what you want to do, you want to connect to the audience, you want to be able to send whatever message it is that you're singing about, you want to be able to convey that - and not make them feel - you want them to feel it, you want them to feel what you feel."


"When you give an artist a canvas, you shouldn't tell him exactly how much paint to put on it, or exactly how sharp the images should be. You should let the artist get going."


"We haven't had a slew of artists, but the artists we do come out with have always had the same momentum."



"Every artist has to grow, and has to challenge themselves with a new form of expression."


"Negroes at last were on Broadway, and there to stay. We were artists and we were going a long way."



"I've always seen myself as sort of this funky, eclectic artist."


"A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one."


"So I guess the complete lack of any new developments is what struck me. That and the fact that much of the good we had done for the artists' side of the industry with G.O.D. had been just as quickly undone by the big boys."


"One of the things I want to do as an artist is to connect generations."


"There's artists that I'm working with on a new label of mine. Foxy Nova and Supa Nova."



"Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world."


"However, the radio and national media depend much more on the hype from a good record label, and from a " buzz " about a band, then from just one or two good shows. There are a lot of artists that have a ton of good press going for them, and still do not make it big in the US."


"I think about that "empty" space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I've had to learn that over the years - because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce."



"I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor."


"I've been touring for so long, I've kind of honed into exactly what I am, I'm an artist so if you like it, you like it, if you don't you don't, you know?"


"I just want to make one really good movie a year. And when I die, to know I was honest as an artist."


"I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company."


"Seeing how those companies operate, it didn't amount to a massive vote of confidence in their artists. There was talk of me going to Columbia after that, but nothing happened. I got disillusioned, and I pulled back."


"Well, first of all it's entertainment. That stops us becoming too pretentious or thinking we're great artists."


"Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star."


"Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons."
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