Quotes About Expression

She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn't fit into a rigid frame.

If Bowie ever fails, it's almost always an interesting failure, which is the mark of a great artist.

I could only use the formula I knew. Which was, you call a song 'China Girl', it better sound Asian. You call a song 'Let's Dance', you damn well better make sure people dance to it.

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.

I've noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it's various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

We don't make music - it makes us.

There's more good music being made now than ever before.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing.

Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is.

Song references are like emotional shortcuts and social acronyms.

music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human.