Elvis Costello Quotes

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

It took me a long time to find my own voice, even after I started making my own music.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.

I like to make the music that I really love. You're supposed to make your favorite music that no one else played, and I'd like to just keep it at that and not really change it at all.

I associate creativity with independent music.

So it's not so much that I set out to do something different, it's just that the songs themselves require their own individual voice and attention.

I wasn't really writing with anything commercial in mind I just wanted to create some new music.

When I begin working on a production, I don't really think about my previous album or albums. I try to have a real creative process.

I just wanted to make melodies. I started trying to do my own thing and let the melodies make the genre themselves.

I'm just trying to be myself - make music how I make music.

I wouldn't start writing songs like 'Name' all the time just because I thought that's what people wanted to hear. I'll write a song in the same vein because it's what I want to write.

I just make my music. It's not too complicated.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

In hip-hop, what you have is you have a lot of formulaic-type bands or rappers that come up. They saw something on the radio, and they want to mimic that formula. And that's just boring. I don't wanna record something just to make money; I want to record something to enjoy it and have fun because I'm a music lover.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

I want to make music that I like; not something that I have to make because I think it's going to sell.

I don't want to sound like Ross; I don't want to sound like Puff. I want to make my own music: French Montana.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

It does not matter how badly you paint so long as you don't paint badly like other people.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why.