Jay-Z Quotes

I was never totally sold on this idea that I'm just a musician. I wanted to be the Tim Burton of music.

I don't want to do one of those records where it's like a compilation of a bunch of all sorts of rappers on my beats. I don't find those to be focused albums. I'd like to sit and work a whole record with a certain person, to come up with a concept and see it through that way.

The Weinsteins believe in test screenings. I don't. I don't think good films are made that way. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think you need a singular vision to make good art.

Well, we played with Soul Coughing once for like two days, that was pretty cool. I mean they were all good, you can pull a great experience from everything.

Well, one always has an instinct to be a painter, and I've done quite a lot of painting at one time or another, though not with any public success.

But, I love making independent films. I love it! You create a family, and you sweat, you bleed, you cry, you shout, you laugh and you hug. It's such an extraordinary experience, making independent films.

I really want to do the unexpected, and I think that's what I did when I executed 'Long.Live.A$AP.' I wanted people to really see the message and that I'm an artist who not only has the capability of rapping, but of composing great music both for people of my generation and for people with different backgrounds.

I'm always trying to find something unique or a project that I can do something unique in. When the director has a vision for a piece that I've never heard before, and they can back that up with visuals and they talk a good game, I get really interested in the world that they're trying to create.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

As a director, my job is to spend money, and the producer's is to save money. Masoom, Bandit Queen and the first Queen Elizabeth have been my most uncompromised films.

Though I respect hugely the effort and the care and the beauty of games, I want to be working with people who want to create the 'War & Peace' of games, the 'Citizen Kane' of games, and not just be warming up George Romero.

Someone once accused me of trying to turn the sitcom into an art form, and I really believe that's what I was trying to do.

It was awesome working with Miley. She's a visionary and she's a creator and has a lot of ideas.

As the days progressed, I felt as if YNK' was my first film. That is because the director was hellbent on perfectionism. He was insistent about getting the best out of me.

I started EWF because I had a vision, and music was playing in my head that I wanted to bring through. What I had in mind was exactly what Earth, Wind & Fire became.

Michael Bennett, Tommy Tune and Agnes de Mille fought to be director-choreographers. They were just not going to do it any other way because the choreographer is so often at the bottom of the creative totem pole when you put a show together. So with that power you get a more direct point-of-view and that helps something called style.

I want to make my kind of films but make them work commercially, too. When my presentation meets the director's imagination, the result will be great.

The only time that I've adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called "Outside" that I did with Brian Eno.

Adrian Maben came to us with the idea. And we just thought, "Well, why not?" I don't think any of us thought it would be as well received and last in people's minds for as long as it did. All credit to him. It's his idea [Pink Floyd at Pompeii] and it was great.

It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.

In Utero is a testament to the artistic vision of Kurt Cobain. It's kind of a weird record, and it's strangely beautiful at the same time. And if you look at Kurt's paintings and his drawings - he even did a sculpture for me - it's a rising, tortured-spirit person. It's kind of weird. It's done well, but it's like what Dave was saying about having your own sound. Kurt was a great songwriter. He knew he had a good ear for a hook [and was] a great singer, great guitar player, and In Utero is a good representation of what he liked in art and how he expressed himself.

I never thought of being a performer, never thought of being a singer, never thought of being a photographer. It's just the trajectory of my work. I go to the medium that serves the vision.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.

A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.