Creative Influences Quotes

I was a young boy when I met the Surrealists and the Dadaists. I admired them, and that is what they taught me: to admire. Admiration is very important. People who are unable to admire others lose an important part of their soul. My soul developed from a very early age through encounters with admired people.

God has been my number one inspiration. I also look up to Will Smith and Jamie Fox who are also personal friends of mine. They give me great career advice. I would also include Chris Stokes, as a filmmaker and music producer. I've been working with him since I was eight.

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there.

Wes Anderson grew up in Houston, and he and I talk about Manhattan in similar ways, as a kind of fantasy world.

I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines.

Influences come from everywhere. I don't really feel like I had too many influences for the first record because I grew up listening to music in church, and that was pretty much it. I didn't really grow up listening to AC/DC and all those bands.

I am inspired and would love to work with Jack Garrett, Tyler Joseph of Twenty One Pilots, and Jack Antonoff.

I find it extremely difficult talking about my songs because there's so many different things that can make a song come together.

My production and songwriting and the environment around those vocals are not inspired by R&B at all.

I don't see it as a bad thing that I surround myself with edgy people. Because they're interesting.

It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

Just out of curiosity, I wonder what makes music or culture or taste go in certain directions. Who knows what the forces are behind it.

Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.

The whole Aleister Black character is a creation of my influences, Triple H and NXT, and everyone combined.

I think for Lev [Grossman], C. S. Lewis was a huge inspiration from his childhood. I know that Brideshead Revisited is a book that he's incredibly found of and he took certain structural influences from that book that he brought into The Magicians.

I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

Writers are voracious readers. Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. Everything was fair game, from Louisa May Alcott to my older cousin's True Romance Magazines, from Lewis Carroll to the backs of cereal boxes. All of this fed me, but it took certain books to make me grow. I don't want to work without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

I've always maintained that RD Burman and Sanjeev Kumar were my two anchors.

I try to listen to a lot of music when I'm in the mixing process of a record, when I'm in post-production and trying to get everything to sound a certain way. During the writing process, I tend not to listen to too much music. I obviously wear a lot of influences on my sleeve, but if I was listening to too many records, I would turn into too much of a monkey.

I didn't have the sensibilities of your ordinary filmmaker, let alone your ordinary African-American filmmaker. My heroes were John Waters, Pedro Almodovar, and actors that were part of that world.

Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century.

A lot of my building blocks - who I am kind of as an artist - all came from being in L.A.

There are a few directors as a young person where I was kind of like, 'Well, these are a sure bet.' The Coens, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson.

I have a bit of a bucolic kind of upbringing, and so I certainly bring an amalgamation of different people that I've met over the course of my life, especially before moving to Los Angeles, so I guess my childhood was my homework in a lot of ways for Harlan County.