Gotye Quotes

If you give yourself too much time, you kind of over-obsess about the music. It's not supposed to be like that.

It's cool to have instruments lying around because they give you different ideas.

Time is very important to art and if you don't have the time to select, art goes out the window.

I find the light and work it, work it, work it.

I obsess over things... especially my book projects. It can be very time consuming.

I think that all my albums are different enough where I don't feel like I did this the last time.

I think I've always been slightly addicted to not repeating myself. When you're doing something the first time around, it's often the best time. I think 'Blank Project' is about carrying on. Its that thing where you're making something because you have to, but you don't know how or why.

Every time I do one I feel like I've never really quite learned anything. I always find that when I'm making a film, I find it a little bit like I'm doing it for the first time.

I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.

You always have in the back of your mind that would be cool if you get recognized. But you can't concentrate on any of those things. You've got to just keep playing and doing your music and the rest is just a bonus.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Usually I'm pretty myopic. It's hard for me to multi-task, so to speak. If I'm in a show and I'm creating a character, I'm just completely into that. It's really hard for me to do anything else like write music. I have to sort of shut down different sides of my head and just focus.

Musical accidents are a gold mine. The thing about accidental discoveries is they won't be made unless you put yourself in a position to make that discovery. To do that means hundreds of hours, days and weeks where you do things and don't discover anything.

When I think about that first DeBarge album, I remember being so green... just pristine. Nothing mattered to me but writing songs. I remember staying locked up in a room with my piano and just singing and writing songs all day long. I remember being a perfectionist about it... wanting to change this and fix that.

I never considered Miles Davis a perfectionist; I always considered him as an excellence-ist, where deviation is actually kind of cool.

I always tell myself, 'When I'm working on my record, I won't cut my hair.' I get so focused on the music that I'm not really going to the hair shop and getting cut up. I just have one thing to focus on.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I got a chance to work with Miles Davis, and that changed everything for me, 'cause Miles really encouraged all his musicians to reach beyond what they know, go into unknown territory and explore. It's made a difference to me and the decisions that I've made over the years about how to approach a project in this music.

I love a lot of things, and I'm pretty much obsessive about most things I do, whether it be gardening, or architecture, or music. I'd be an obsessive hairdresser.

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

My drumming is always an experiment.

I'm very serious about what I do. I practice every day for three hours. I work on my scales; I work on my tone. But otherwise, I like to have fun.

And I look forward to the time when I can become more indulgent with my songwriting. But this band is a family, and it's a process that we have to grow with together.

I'm a serious student of music, a perfectionist in the studio, and I take the arrangement and production of it very seriously, down to the mixing and mastering even. But at the same time I'm having so much fun with it. I try not to take myself so seriously.

I find that stability is good for my creativity.