Creative Progression Quotes

The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did.

I think people have been really receptive to understanding that I've grown up and the music's going to sound a little different.

Musically, I'm always gonna take it a little farther, and Lord willing, people are gonna get that and understand that: that there's not really one genre I'm trying to be in, but just as a producer, as a writer, as an artist, that I'm planning on going farther.

When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.

Hip-hop artists, especially the older ones, are the ones who knew hip-hop was a worldwide phenomenon before the mainstream caught on, so hip-hop artists are forward thinkers. We want to stay with the new.

Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years it's a name that the streets taught me a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment and I feel I've done quite a bit with that name and it's time to expand and move on.

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

I'm not likely to forget where I've been and what I've done and learned. I think it's just as important to play new instruments as to play new pieces. The old ones are getting scarcer and the new ones more and more wonderful.

I want to grow as an artist, and I'm taking a step out. I want my music to mature.

If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

Music has to keep moving. But I was lucky. For me there was always something around the corner.

I think being a little older and a little more determined and being a little more evolved in my case and maturity in the kind of music I was doing and how I was doing it really helped to keep me grounded and with an audience that could appreciate what I was doing, who grew with me and evolved with me and kept me alive and around.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

You know exactly what I think of photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. (In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz)

I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.

The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding.

For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.

To be honest with you, I don't have one track that I consider better than the next because all I'm trying to do is still grow as an artist. I got way better since the early nineties, as far as putting words together. My best energy probably was the '90s, because I was new.

With every film, I try and give the audiences a little more than the previous film in terms of comedy, action, drama and so on.

I feel like I introduce another level of my creative ability on every album.

I'm going to keep evolving and evolving and showing people that progression is key when it comes to music.

I was excited about the fourth movie I guess conceptually because, what I felt we should do it, we should try to make it a conceptual jump like Terminator did to T2. It was still the Terminator franchise, but it was something kind of bigger and grander.

I plan to take Hoods Up to another level of art once we've reached the level of doing so.

It's neat to hear a new generation of musicians come up.

Ultimately, I'd like to create a body of work where every album has its own personality and a reason to exist within the catalog, not just 'more of the same.'