Quotes About Expression

I think it's a mistake to work on success in career. I've worked on my passions obsessively. How can I say what I want to say more precisely than the last time I said it? Success is such an elusive concept. When you work for it, I think you get it in a way you might regret it.

I think the best songs are being written by the very under-stated, under-appreciated indie artists. The thing that separates them from mainstream success is they either consciously or unknowingly refuse to deliver on a big chorus.

To me, success has already happened. I get to make records and live doing that. Success is that.

One thing I don't understand is how people want you to replicate your past successes. Being an artist should be about freedom and not just becoming one thing, because I think that's terrible and boring.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

The kids that are different and out there and expressive and are bold with those choices, those are the people that grow up to be people we all want to hang out with, that become celebrities or become really successful in what they do because they believe in who they are.

Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don't feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I'm doing, I think back on it, and I've just been by myself. Like, I'm just a sketch.

Contempt is the only asymmetrical facial expression, so it's easy to spot once you're aware of its signs. One researcher has successfully tracked it in couples as a predictor of divorce. When someone is angry at you, you've still got traction with them, but when they display contempt, you've been dismissed.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

I do Broadway because I refuse to succumb to the stereotypical things that Hollywood does to a performer.

There's a lesbian aesthetic, just as there's gay camp, but I don't know if there's such a thing as 'lesbian art.'

Movement is expressive. I've never denied that. I don't think there's such a thing as abstract dance.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Is there such a thing as black art? Or are there just artists who are black?

I think there can no longer be such a thing as hitting a wall on a photo shoot. If I ever hear a photographer say to me, 'OK, what else?' I should retire, because that should never happen now having experienced just how much the body is capable of doing.

I'm really interested in social justice, and if an artist has a certain power of being heard and voicing something important, it's right to do it. It could still be done in such a way that it's not aggressive or overly didactic. I'm trying to find that form.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

Even if you're specific about the character of the song, it's more exciting to place them, juxtapose them in such a way as to make an adventure out of the sequence of the songs.