Oprah Winfrey is a big role model for me from a business capacity and a creative capacity. She is an incredible interviewer who cultivated a certain style by inserting her own personhood into a show on national television at a time when no one was talking about empowerment, spirituality, or our inner lives.
Since my 'Crown of Midnight' tour in 2013, we've had such a rapid jump in audience numbers that we've had to move to bigger venues, cap events, and find new and creative ways to keep the line flowing while still allowing me the chance to chat with each person, which will always be very, very important to me.
The momentum of my creative life and intellectual growth is still the momentum of breaking out of fundamentalism. Because of that, I'm very grateful for it. But I'm also grateful that at the center of it was something that I still believe to be true - those fundamentals of faith.
I do tend to apply myself to projects that make me uncomfortable because usually when that happens I try to find a way of existing in the project that is more creative.
Top creative and innovative talent wants to live in a vibrant, transit-friendly, global city that offers access to not only great jobs but also great food, entertainment and culture.
In a creative business, if you're happy, it will come out in your work. I don't see how you can be happy if you don't like the people you're working with and if they aren't a joy to have fun with.
The best thing that can happen to people entering creative professions is the dwindling of all other possibilities.
What about the accusation that Hollywood is trying to advance its liberal agenda? Well, the fact is, while the creative community admittedly leans left, Hollywood has become a corporate town.
For me to do a project - I have a pretty successful solo career, so - for me to even want to do Primus, it had to be a creative step forward.
I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.
I like Ben Stein. I think he's funny, creative, and an insightful commentator on a host of issues.
Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.
I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.
I've always been comfortable thinking things through and doing it, more or less, my way. You can be as creative as you want, but if you're... unwilling to work on the details, to see those put into action, then creativity is just dreams, or worse, hallucinations.
As a director, I've wanted to have adventure in my life, creative adventure. I think it's partly because I grew up, basically from age six to 26, mostly on television series where the producers find something that works and then do it over and over and over again.
Sometimes, thinking on your feet can be the most creative. Constrained circumstances can bring the best out of you. Some of the most successful shows come out of shoestring invention.
I'm a believer in just open, free-form creativity, and you never know the surprises that life has in store, and that, purely on a creative level, there's no such thing as rules.
I think that you just understand, as any creative person, that there's a beast that you have to beat, and it never goes away. I've resigned myself to that, and it's kind of what keeps you going. Writing is the worst and the best.
I think it's natural for a creative to be sensitive. If I'm in the studio and I write something, I think it's the greatest thing in the world; it's like my baby. I just made something out of thin air that exists now in a tangible form. It's the biggest thrill in my life.
That's the very definition of freedom: to be allowed to develop our own creative potential to the fullest. But it doesn't have to be in the arts, obviously. In my case, I gravitated toward the arts.
I want to do some bigger films, so long as there's some sort of exciting creative element or a good filmmaker behind them.
It's just difficult to see that people want to be like the actors and the performers and the politicians who are - who they see all the time, but the people that are probably having the most fun are the writers and the directors and the producers and the scientists, right, the people in the back that are getting to do the creative process.
Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.
I don't know what drives me, but I wake up in the morning, and I want to participate in the creative cultural conversation.
I went to a very academic school, but I never really quite... I think because not that many people were particular creative or arty, I felt a little bit different.
In the media business and as a creative executive, if you don't take risks, you're dead in the water. Calculated risk taking is essential for success. No one said it was easy.
When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That's when you can get more creative in solving problems.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.
Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you've ever met.
Will Forte is such a nice, extraordinarily creative human being. Utterly fearless.
My sights have always been on acting, on the creative process, never the lifestyle. Growing up in Northern Ireland when I did, everything was against you if you wanted to do something like that. But I was determined.
The voice for 'Surly' is, of course, very close to my own voice, but it's informed a lot by this story, by the arc and the animation and working with the whole creative team on 'The Nut Job' in finding what really works.
I get lonely - I'm not going to lie about that... I kind of signed up in my mind that I'm giving myself wholeheartedly, full-throttle to my creative life, and I don't want to be distracted.
A choreographer deals with the movement that you create, and with a creative director it's about the story, the stage, the lighting, the costuming, executing someone's idea, choosing how far to go or how little to go, and blending it so that you feel it, you're emotionally effected.
I wouldn't say I'm personally trying to transition from comedy into drama. I don't look at things like, 'Oh, I need to do a drama now.' I get a lot of material sent to me, and if I feel like something has the creative integrity and the right director and the right whoever involved, the right actors and is a great story, then I do it.
I want to feel like I'm doing something creative and trying different things, putting different hats on and playing. I don't know what's the point otherwise; otherwise, it's just a job. You punch a time clock.
