Anoushka Shankar Quotes

I don't tally the world, asking, "Would this annoy you? Would this annoy you?" That's so far removed from where I'm at when I'm in the trenches struggling with how to express things that I don't fully understand myself.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

An actress must be a woman whose emotional perceptions are true, and to make them so, she must have a fine contempt for any art or thought that betrays them for something false.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

As far as the creative process goes, I always make sure that anything that gets discussed or talked about in the record is true to form. I make it a point not to sing anything that I haven't felt or gone through.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel - not the way others think you should feel.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

I'm never going to be a flat-line guy. My heart is going to be on my sleeve with every shot.

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

I really wanted it to be organic and coming from my heart. So, I think maybe the initial thought of wanting to go in that direction, I had to wait until things happened in our world and in our country that fired me up enough where the words came out organically.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.

I just wanted Sadness to be true, to come from a real place. I tried to work from the inside out, going from my gut all the time. I didn't over-analyze it. I just did it.

My fans don't feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I'm going through now, they'll hear about it on a record someday. They'll hear the real story. There's a little bit of lag time. It's not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it's much more accurate.

I try to make music with emotion and integrity. And authenticity. You can feel when something's authentic, and you can feel when it's not: you know when someone's trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It's none of that. It's just my emotions.

Writing has never been an intentional endeavor to me. I know a lot of people have experiences and then sit down and try to sort them out through song, but whenever I sit down to write, it comes out hackneyed or overly saccharine.

My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment.

I just want to be an artist that makes exactly what he feels.

It's inevitable that if you write an album or a song, obviously it's going to come from how you feel. You're writing it for yourself, it's just the way it is.

I like to just make flex music. So when I do make emotional music, it's hard for me, because I feel like I'm cliche. But I guess cliche is the best thing sometimes, because it's real.

I feel like I can't write something that has a real emotion in it if I can't connect to that emotion.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

As a writer, as a storyteller, you have to have your emotions close, and the older I've gotten, the less I've worried about not displaying emotions.