Creative Categorization Quotes

When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.

I just don't think most people put myself and Robert Frost in the same category.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

I have a very difficult time describing my music. Because I run into people in the hardware store and they go, 'Oh, you're a musician. So what kind of music do you play?' And I go, 'Uh, I've been doin' this for many years - I don't know what to call it.'

I dislike labels like 'commercial' and 'non commercial.'

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.

I'm not so arrogant to consider mine the only legitimate art form. I can't in one breath make a fuss about someone compartmentalizing music into genre and then in the next accuse advertising and short film of not being art.

I think they want to keep it separate, but I've never been a crossover artist for some reason.

Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.

I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.

What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.

A director is a director. We shouldn't categorize one into a this or that director.

I don't really like to put stuff in a box as far as genre-specific.

If Americans thought music and art belonged together, they wouldn't have the Grammys.

Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.

The work of black creatives seems to always get undermined in one way or another, and that's what this new generation is actively changing by speaking up. We aren't accepting group categorization and group classifications to describe our work anymore - it just leads to group dismissal.