All artists are egotistical maniacs with inferiority complexes.
I love producing. My dream as a producer is to be able to build a company that can be a safe haven for artists, for directors and for writers and actors to do what they do best and let them have final edit. I'd like to build something to that effect.
I've tried to learn as much as I can about the great jazz singers to understand what makes them important, vital artists, but there is always something more to learn.
My mother, my grandmother, my uncles would play Ethiopian artists like Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke all the time in the house.
I don't think that there's much that sets me apart from other musicians, but I think there are definitely things that set me apart from other kinds of artists. I feel that musicians do it their own way, write their own songs and put on a great live shows.
Compared to a lot of artists, I'm usually quite covered up in videos and photo shoots.
I wouldn't say I'm underrated, but more reserved. Only time will tell, but I've been good so far in being consistent and making hit after hit writing for myself and other artists, from rap to R&B, and being able to make those different records.
Iconic artists are never straight ahead. Michael Jackson loved Elvis and Burt Bacharach, and uniquely blended both of them into what he did.
I like handsome-devil artists the best.
Pop music seems to be the way radio programming has chosen to support female artists. They have chosen not to support a more provocative voice from women, which I find disappointing.
You have to remember that you are part of a craft, and you are constantly building your craft. Ultimately, we are artists, so it comes from us. And I think the tricky thing about being an actor is that we're looking for someone else to give us something... Thinking like an artist and thinking like an out-of-work actor are two different things.
If people respect us as artists, they know we'll give them something different every time; they know we're pushing ourselves.
Of course we had the best possible classical education, which gave us a very strong foundation and tradition. But we also learned a lot by collaborating with different pop/rock artists and especially by recording and working in the studio.
Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.
Artists look at the environment, and the best artists correctly diagnose the problem. I'm not saying artists can't be leaders, but that's not the job of art, to lead. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte - there are artists all through history who have become leaders, but that was already in them, nothing to do with their art.
There are some artists that don't like working with other females, which is fine. They have their own thing. I personally love being surrounded by other females.
I don't tweet very much. I still believe in the mystery of an artist. I believe in going out when I'm ready to sell my product. A lot of artists are out there every day. But I remember the Julio Iglesiases, the Jose Joses - and it was about the music.
The first play I ever did was with Michael Langham, Brian Bedford, and Colm Feore, at Stratford Festival. That was my first professional job, and I got to work with Garland Wright and so many great artists.
We have to show support for artists who are trying to own things for themselves.
My mother is the sort of a person who has no boundaries and no filter. She also has a big ego, but it's a very unique one. And I grew up with lots of artists in an environment where conformity and the norm were totally not what anybody was after.
I come from a family of artists.
There was a bidding war between Epic Records and Jive - now RCA - which was bittersweet. Just having labels bid over me was really cool, but I ended up going with Jive because it felt better over there, and they have my favorite artists like Usher, Chris Brown, and Justin Timberlake.
I'm taking a lot of my favorite artists, different people, my favorite music and marrying that with what I do as a comic. It's very collaborative, arty, fun and cool.
There are a lot of country artists now that are heavily influenced by hip-hop. That's not me. I was very heavily influenced by rock & roll.
Our job as artists is to reflect the ills of society sometimes and to find a truth in that, and I think you can't start the healing process until you recognize the truth and all of its ugly warts and all.
There are a lot of artists in Gowanus, and certain things come into your visual vocabulary from living there - the scale of the subway and the canal, sometimes it almost looks like a de Chirico painting, with the intense angles of the shadows and everything.
Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!
I think that there will always be artists out there who think they need to sign a major label deal in order to be successful. And that machine is what is going to work for them - there's tons of examples of pop stars who need that machine.
What men are among the other formations of the earth, artists are among men.
You could make the most beautiful film, and that weekend it's raining too hard on the East Coast, and no one goes out. Artists should have a chance to do it again. That's the challenge: Women artists don't get a second chance. People-of-color artists don't get a second chance. You're put in director's jail, and that's a wrap.
There's this notion that artists are supposed to be dumb and frivolous. I completely disagree with that.
I like the Zen artists: they'd do some work, and then they'd stop for a while.
Jay-Z ain't a manager; he owns a management company. He been through this; he been through the game for a long time, so he knows tactics in taking artists in certain directions we need to go in.
There's a lot of artists whose contracts are written in such a way that they do not get paid for what's happening on streaming services.
All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music.
Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart before the horse.
