Creative Longevity Quotes

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down - we're not going to be the number one group in the world forever - so you have to have something else to fall back on.

I just hope that I'll stay around musically for as long as I can. I love to think that I will still be satisfying myself and other people as a musician until the day I die.

I just hope that my films will survive me.

As a musician, life is not over just because you are getting older, and so I find retirement a very frightening and dark thought.

Most artists lose their voice, their hair, and their bands. That's not going to happen to me.

I intend to be making films until I'm an old lady. So, if God willing I get there, I need to create a paradigm for myself where I can make it regardless of whether or not they still like what I'm making.

Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

Music is my passion so I feel like I'll be doing this for a long time and God forbid if anything happens I'll still write music. So, I could write music for other people. I see myself making music for a very long time.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

For some reason, it seems like pop writers, it's like they just get worse or something over time. And then you're really jealous of movie directors whose careers seem to grow and they'll be 70 years old and still doing these incredible jobs. I'm going to reverse that, I hope.

I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a ­vibrancy to it 50 years from now.

One need not fear for the future of music.

There are very few of us, who reach my advanced age, who are still working in the business, as writers. As artists, people can hang out longer.

I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. I'm 17 now: what happens by the time I'm 21, am I a burn-out or something? Will they still listen to my record?

Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don't think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

I don't think a songwriter should lose their mojo. In my situation, I'm one of those artists that lasts over a long period rather than have your moment and your moment is gone.

I want to be able to say that a rap career could be ten albums.

I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.

I'm 39, and I would like to be able to make great pop music for another 20 years. And it feels like creating a sort of inanimate blond bob and allowing other people to play the role of the pop singer, it affords me a little bit more freedom in terms of my expiration date.

Art is one of the few careers without a mandatory retirement age.

I don't think rock 'n roll is necessarily a young man's game. I think Neil Young is just as rock'n'roll now as he was in his 20s. I'd like to think we can still be edgy and challenging.