Oneohtrix Point Never Quotes

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

R. Kelly is different - music is always going through his brain. I remember we'd be having a conversation, and he'd choose a word I said and write a whole song to it.

I got to pick the mind of a genius, and I realized why he was a genius. And I realized the man behind the veil or whatever you want to call it. Do you know what I mean? I got to see what makes Dr. Dre Dr. Dre, and I got to interpret that. It's hard to put it into words, so the only thing I know how to do is put it on the screen.

I try to imagine what the greatest song I could ever write would sound like, and then try to do it.

Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.

I have some irrepressible pop impulses to write an appealing, concise song. And I also have some irrepressible kind of restlessness as well, and I need to keep myself interested. When I'm left to my own devices, there's a struggle.

I'd never take any credit for David's music - that's all his.

One of the things about dealing with an artist is that their art is essentially - if they're successful, it's kind of lightning in a bottle. There is no formula for it.

The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe.

I don't think it's a mistake to put every great idea into the first movie, because I've always said there won't be a second movie if you go 'we'll hold back these ideas for another one.

Sometimes success demands a certain refined insanity.

No man ever followed his genius till it misled him.

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

My creative life is a constant struggle to achieve a balance between letting things flow in and letting things flow out.

What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty.

I’m torn between the desire to create and the desire to destroy.

Often I have struggled for days to get the image of the photograph to overlap the spirit I see. It is an awesome responsibility, and a lonely one.

I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then, "Nowhere Man" came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down...Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won't let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you're allowed sleep.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.