Artistic Adaptation Quotes

All my albums always go with the times.

Every artist will one day face the moment when he or she is doing what he or she does after the style has passed and the art-world heat-seeking machine has moved on.

My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.

It's great when a director like Cameron Crowe can take what you do and fit it into what he's doing. If someone's a fan of you already, they can take what you do and make it work for what they're doing. You don't know their vision, and you're thinking, 'How is this guy going to take what I do and make it work in this movie?'

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish. After all, I choreographed for myself. I never choreographed what I could not do. I changed steps in Medea and other ballets to accommodate the change. But I knew. And it haunted me. I only wanted to dance.

When I started as a filmmaker, I never, ever imagined in a million years that I would be doing television because, at that time, TV was a very different medium.

Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.

I started as a guitarist and couldn't find a decent singer, so I started providing my own vocals.

The music is going to die if you don't tap into something that people today can relate to.

I never know who's influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I'm consciously adapting that play, or, as I've done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I'm consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it's the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don't feel that I'm under the influence of any such sources.

Me being in Houston, I wanted to leave there because it was only known for one thing. That's why I hit N.Y.; that's why I hit L.A. That's why I hit Paris, London. I just picked up basically everything, but I morphed it into what Travi$ Scott is and into what I know is fresh.

Some of my own books are being developed - one as a Broadway musical.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.

In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

I would never ever sing at all if I could get away with it. I had pitch problems, no range. So what I did was manipulate the sound... that way you couldn't tell that I wasn't very good.

So, hopefully, us finding ways to constantly work, but always with a different product, will help our band play to more people and continue making music.

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

I've very critical of myself, and film has been an adjustment for me.

The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didnt seem good enough.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

As we get further into our career we're figuring out how to become more efficient as artists, and doing so many different things is testament to our cohesiveness as the Roots.

When Peter Schneider first approached me about adapting 'Sister Act' for the stage, it wasn't a slam dunk to say yes.

Ledger art represents a spirit which has lasted through the hardships and turmoil. It is my goal and ambition that this style of pictograph art continues to pay tribute to the perseverance of my ancestors who adapted and created works of art during a period of life changing turmoil and injustice.