Estelle Quotes

I've always tried to stay clear of being labeled, putting a label on what type of music that I make.

Once you achieve a certain level of success or fame, it becomes really difficult to go against type.

I knew that in Hollywood they tend to pigeonhole talent, and when you experience a little success in one genre, their instinct is to keep you in that box.

I'm not very well known. However, the more well known you get, the more people are going to have expectations of you. Although that's great, it also imposes certain pressures.

You are still lucky - you have a certain type of people who keep buying your music - but then you can get typecast and have to keep making that same music, and you can change only slightly. It's risky to bounce around and change your type of music.

I don't like being put in a box. I just make music, you know?

I was almost kind of trapped by my own success into only doing rock.

Bob Marley is one of the most recognized artists. He didn't care to be defined. People wondered, 'Is it reggae? Is it rock?' But at the end of the day they were still playing his music and that's what matters.

I was being categorized as some kind of twangy songwriter. And that's just not how I see myself.

I think being famous is more of a hindrance, a constraint, than just letting yourself be free.

It's bad to be labeled just another singer-songwriter.

As an artist, program directors always want to put you in a little box.

Once you become tagged as anything, it becomes difficult to shake it, because the less imaginative people in the business want you to do what worked for the last guy. That's always been something I've had to deal with.

In terms of being typecast, if you do something like Father Ted that infiltrates the public's imagination to the extent that it did, I think realistically you're not going to be asked to do something radically different from that very often. But it's not a problem.

I sort of went 'Oh, great. I'm getting these great roles and I love doing them, but I'm going to be Anthony Perkins for the rest of my life.'

Some people don't listen to my music because they say that I am an artist. And some don't want to go to my gallery shows, because they say I am a musician.

We all get pigeon-holed or put in a box, no matter what that might be.

They're never gonna not put you in a box. It's something that they have to do, because nine times out of 10 people don't understand creativity.

When I first started to do music, I was kind of doing what I thought people would want me to do.

I hate the idea of genres.

People want to peg you as alternative R&B when they hear soul or see the color of your skin. It's comfortable when people see artists of color or artists that come from a different country to put that brand on us. It's just not as linear as that.

I don't want everyone to think I'm just the girl who acts.

I don't want to be boxed in or looked at a certain way, as in, 'Yo, he's an Asian rapper.'

Once the world sees you as that one thing, and the better you are at that thing, the more you can only be that thing.

I think - a lot of times in hip-hop, especially - artists get kind of pigeonholed into being 'the guy,' and it's kind of limiting in a way.