Nicki Minaj Quotes

Music means freedom to me. But in acting you can pretend to be someone else and I like that.

When people like your music because it has vulnerable honesty, and you're able to comfortably admit to flaws and imperfections, then that's the most liberating thing about being an artist.

Express yourself through your art - whether it’s your drawings in a sketchpad, tattoos on your skin, the shade of your lipstick, or the clothes that you wear.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

Sometimes I think I'm more comfortable onstage than I am in my own room. When I get onstage, it's kind of like your chance to let go and be something that you're not maybe. It's your time to dream.

All the traumas I went through separating art from writing don't exist anymore. That's why I love being in rock 'n' roll. It's a whole life thing.

Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of.

The important thing about doing art and writing is that we are using our voices and using them really, really loudly. And to any girls or young women who want to write comics, I tell them, "You have to use your voice. You have to take up space." We have to fight to be heard. No one else is going to fight for us.

For instance, I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting, because that's how I see life. I'm interested in art, poetry, and music. As that kind of artist, I can do anything. I can say anything. It's about self-expression. It knows no package - there's no such thing. That's what being an artist is.

I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. But if you dress up in a police officer's uniform, it doesn't mean that you are an officer; it can mean something else. But this is the starting point, and the best way is to not to fit into this uniform but to make this uniform a part of yourself.

I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.

What I became a comedian for was to get my art out. To get some of these feelings and things I had on my chest out. I don't care if people believe them, listen to them, change their ways, or think, or any of that kind of crap. I'm interested in showing off. I'm the same kid from sixth grade who stood up and said "watch this."

The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.

The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don't care what you think.

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

Precocious and eccentric are okay. But I think that people in the arts represent something integral and kind of secretive in everybody else. So the reason people like some artists is because they're saying or doing something that they would like to do or say, but they don't have the balls or the means. People are really afraid to put their ass on the line. Just to put your face on a poster and put your name in big print and say "Come see me," that takes some cojones, you know? Ambition is nothing to be ashamed of.

I never really followed the traditional route when it comes to what people probably expect as a solo artist goes, but that's just me. It's my own creative output and it's my expression.

I think people don't understand that comedy is an outlet for me. Comedy allows me to get outside of myself, and exercise this thing that is still kind of scary to me.

I like the idea of having many different ways to express myself. There is a part of me as an artist and a creator who would like to express myself in many different ways. But then at the same time I know I have limited hours in the day, and I can only do so much successfully.

I come alive when I'm painting. I like to work in oils and acrylics, and the full sensory engagement and self-expression is very stimulating to me.

I didn't want to be pigeonholed as an artist. I wanted to be able to have other stories to tell.

I'll probably never produce a masterpiece, but so what? I feel I have a Sound aborning, which is my own, and that Sound if erratic is still my greatest pride, because I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette.

Writing is the one art form that really should allow you to hang yourself.

I feel cleaner on the days where I am painting as opposed to the periods when I am not, that is certain to me. In a sense it is a transfiguration, what comes at me in my life or what I see going on in the world comes out as something beautiful or hopefully beautiful.