Creative Classification Quotes

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

I never knew I was a surrealist till Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.

None of my dudes I chill with are rappers. I don't put us as rappers. We're all artists.

I have come to terms with the fact that it's called pop music - that's what I play, and that is what I write. I think it is a pretty broad category.

I don't think an artist should keep themselves categorized in a specific box.

I don't like to classify my own tracks as a genre.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.

I hate it when people say, I'm an artist. I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think artist is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work. I guess in the art world I'm not exactly a photographer, but I do use photography.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.

I never divide photographers into creative and uncreative, I just call them photographers. Who is creative? How do you know who is creative or not?

I don't label films or actors, and labelling means setting boundaries. Why do you want to do that to art?

'Scott Pilgrim' is something that was a little bit more difficult to put in one box. But, to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing about the movie.

A few words about the question of whether photography is art or not: I never understood the question.

I don't even consider myself an impressionist, really.

Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.

I never thought we were a country band in the first place. I think we've gotten ourselves into a place where we don't underestimate our listeners and what potential there is for the music they've heard all their lives.

Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.

Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and many other great jazz musicians objected to their music being called jazz. While the outside world may want to put a label on it, those who create it think of it just as music, and tend not to classify it.

Ah, genre. A word only a Frenchman could love.

I'm definitely a cult artist.

Many people misunderstand me - I'm quite happy to be called a photographer. All of a sudden, the art world has caught up with photography, and they are trying to hijack us.

I'm not a children's songwriter. I'm not in that world.

Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets.

There are so many different types of writers. It's just sheer coincidence that they're all called writers.