Creative Empowerment Quotes

When I first started, I wrote some songs with Linda Perry. She's so instrumental in a lot of artist's lives, listening to you and then helping you write songs that are you, that bring the most of what you are out, whereas a lot of producers might put their stamp on you. I gained confidence because I'm less of a straight-up, traditional vocalist.

Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?

At first, I am giving energy to the creation, but later the creation seems to be giving energy to me.

I'm not here to write a song for you, I'm here to help you write a song for yourself.

Don't treat your ideas like they're nothing, don't treat yourself like you're nothing, because you and your ideas are important and meaningful and have the potential to become so much more than you realize.

We're at a moment where people are rediscovering their ability to design, to create (engineer)and in essence, to become a true maker.

All the things that are negative in me as a person - the incompetence and despair and weakness and pain - are like a gift from God in a performer. If you don't hide them and if you stop lying to yourself about what you are and are not, there is a ring or a tent or a stage where you can take them and use them to make something beautiful.

Architects everywhere have recognized the need of ... a tool which may be put in the hands of creators of form, with the simple aim ... of making the bad difficult and the good easy.

You can live in your total potential creative capacity in an instant-with your heart open to give and receive love.

I've watched so many women, from Kathleen Hanna all the way up to Taylor Swift, whether they're pop artists or rock stars or fine artists or writers, it is the subhistory of female artists that if you're going to make art, you're also going to have a full-time job of defending your right to make art.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

When I heard Bjork's debut, that was when I first realized that I could be a singer, even with my unusual voice.

I have a great deal of hope. I think that change is here, it's happening. But I know that if we think it's just going to happen on its own, that's not the way it works. We need people to keep talking about women of color writing comics and living the charge. Not just talking but doing. Making art, putting it out there.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is - I don't even want to say that it's mine, because it's yours.

Because storytelling, and visual storytelling, was put in the hands of everybody, and we have all now become storytellers.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

...whenever there is inspiration...and enthusiasm...there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.

I'm trying to embrace social media because it gives artists a little more power than we've had in the past.

Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.

I've never been in the studio where it felt like I didn't have a voice. Whether I was co-producing or producing by myself, this community is the one place where I really see democracy at its purest.

Feminist art may... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme... should we call it 'joy'?

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

Hollywood wants to own everything. I don't want to own anything. I don't want people just to make content, I want to empower and teach them to create content they own that they can exploit in any medium.

When I began writing, the words that inspired me were these: A writer is someone who has written today. If you want to be a writer, whats stopping you?

There aren't a lot of entertainment-based mediums, the visual or recorded mediums, that empower the audience to go off the next day and create it themselves. You can't watch a movie or a show and the next day say, 'I want to make that.' You have to go to school.