Robert Krulwich Quotes

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I'm concerned.

Knowing how to paint and to use one's colors rightly has not any connection with originality. This originality consists in properly expressing your own impressions.

Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.

I associate creativity with independent music.

When I started to make music at the end of the '90s, I saw myself highly influenced by hip-hop and techno, but I wanted to apply these ideas to something from the local sound; something that had identity, that would say who we were and where we came from.

I kind of always wanted my own music to just sound like, like me, I suppose, like if I was music it would be the music I make, I think.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

The main thing in making your own music is that it's an expression of someone's personality and being. That's what people want to hear, and you can't really teach that - that's just something that comes out. Teaching just hones that.

Without a doubt, the best way to get to know me is through my music.

If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work.

I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

I don't feel like I'm an artist with a capital 'A.'

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

I've been singing since I was five. It's my identity.

Silence marks time, saturates and shapes African-American art. Silences structure our music, fill the spaces - point, counterpoint - of rhythm, cadence, phrasing.

Music helps me tell my story. That's where I can really be heard. But there's so much focus on the things that aren't music.

I really feel like I honed in on a sound and a style of writing that best fits me.

Puerto Rico's relationship with music is everything. It's an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

I believe that if you're an artist, it's like a gift. If you can do this for a living and you can be involved in it, it's something that you can't ignore. It's the chance for you to have a voice and create something from yourself.

'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.

If I only acted, I feel like I wouldn't have enough creative expression over my own sensibility, and also if I only acted, the notion of surrendering my fate and future to other people is deeply unsettling to me and it would make me uncomfortable.

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

My style is part of the music I like, the bands I see, the people I surround myself with, the places I go to.

I feel, as an artist, I should be able to express who I am and the things I come from, and the places I want to also be.