Quotes about Artistry

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they're not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don't care about money, and that's not my problem.

Create your world around your work. Create your work around your life. Let other people help you shape it.

An artist does his most difficult work when he steps back from the blank canvas and thinks about what he is going to create.

A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

You are both a work of art and an artist at work.

What we make is more important than what we are, particularly if making is our profession.

The product of the head, heart and hand is a thing to be loved.

I think that's the graveyard of musicians, playing cabaret. I think I'd rather be dead than work in cabaret. It's just so depressing.

Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.

Could a person really make a social contribution through music consciously? I mean, beyond making a person happy to hear the song and more making a social contribution consciously through your music? For me, Stevie Wonder is the paragon of that. And I didn't want to be Stevie Wonder, but I did want to do what he does.

I definitely don't want to only make music in the Christian genre. I want to expand and kind of dive into whatever else is in store. But that doesn't mean I don't love what I get to do as well.

I've never stared out at the ocean while I've made a record before - that enhances things in a strange way.