Artistic Reinvention Quotes

Bowie has been in my mind as someone who disappeared from the public for a long time and then emerged. A strange, exotic creature - he seems to inherit a tradition of enigma and exclusiveness.

If you walked around like David Bowie in 1973 in Reading, you'd get beaten up. The 1970s in a small town was more like the 1950s.. and that's the truth. The backdrop was probably Victorian.

I used to be like "Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?" But then, we do that all the time in the theater. Retelling stories is what we've done since we were sitting around campfires. It's a part of the human spirit. It doesn't have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite.

One thing about me is that I'm very much like the Black Madonna. I love to reinvent myself and that's because I am a very free person.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

I'm someone who admires artists like Madonna and David Bowie, who really change their sound drastically between each record.

Once I'd chosen the songs, it seemed like it would just be a question then of recording them. But it's a case of trying to re-invent the songs; taking them in different directions.

It's something I've recognized in the careers of those people who have been inspiring to me over the years - Neil Young, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, and Prince. These are all people who constantly redefined themselves, and had to deal with the difficulty of trying to take their audience with them when they did that.

I wouldn't want to cover a Hank Williams song in a country-western way. It doesn't occur to me instinctually to re-create productions. I'm interested in re-creating songs. Putting different clothes on them.

I'm not going to be singing songs that I made in the past. I closed the door on that incarnation of Sinead O'Connor.

Once you're done in hip-hop, you're done.

Mr. Koons's work has always inspired architects, which I think is very interesting. I think he is an artist who has reinvented himself so many times and reinvented so many different series.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

Yehudi Wyner has reinvented for himself a Romanticism that somehow manages to seem like a step forward rather than a step back.

One thing that has really influenced me with Bowie where I've taken an approach from him is how he changes from album to album and has always modified his sound and his appearance. I think that's an important thing.

With each new album: I need to kill the last version of me.

Truth be told, of course, what I enjoy most is reinventing myself and doing new projects where I work in new genres, or I get to find what the voice of a particular musical is.

Part of my success with urban bachata is reinventing yourself as an artist and continuing to give people different kind of fusions, mixing up the elements and concepts without changing the beat.

My music, I feel, has always been experimental, but it had got to a point where I felt disconnected from it completely. I didn't want to be a Clark Kent/Superman: I couldn't really say, 'Well, B.o.B's the old me, and Bobby Ray's the new me.' I had to just make a point.

Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Theatre de Complicite, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind, these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.

I'm 45 years old. I used to be a club girl, but that's not my world anymore. That doesn't mean I can't make music that excites. I think it's inspiring to see an artist you grew up with take another crack.

I feel like Drake is doing exactly what I plan on doing, just being sick for all of, what, a decade now? And just always being able to switch it up and never stay in one box.

I always try to give my own albums space in between so I have time to create a new sound and give time for people to miss me. You have to come out fresh and reinvent yourself.

We didn't reinvent the circus. We repackaged it in a much more modern way.

Bowie mattered to me. He reinvented himself so many times - it must have been a daring statement to do that, risking failure. And hanging out with him and seeing him like that - he's my dad's age, born in the same month - when you find someone who's been through a really dark period, which most of his music I care about is from, Low, Lodger, "Heroes" era.... But he came out of it and made something that mattered.