I always saw myself as a singer-songwriter, a solo-artist, that's why working with other artists was never satisfying for me.
Marvin Gaye was one of the coolest. I look to him as a style icon and as an artist.
Music was my life...It was everything to me, even though I was in school majoring in English. I was still very focused on music and always finding ways to perform, so that was what set me up to want to become a recording artist.
But in my mind I've always been a solo artist- I've just been working with a lot of great people like Kanye and Alicia Keys and Jay-Z.
I've felt like my last name put pressure on me as an artist. If you're going to call yourself "Legend," you'd better make some good-ass music.
It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.
Every artist wants some sort of feedback, because you make this music and you hope people love it and you want to hear if they love it and what they love about it, what their favorite song is, what they think the next single should be. I like to hear those things.
Artists in general never stay in the same place, we keep growing. It's still you, you still have that core that you always had, but you work with new people and hear new things.
What's fun about the story development at Pixar is it's a journey. You don't just write a script and then that's the movie you make. It's just constant evolution and being open to that and that collaboration with the voice actors and with the artists and animators at Pixar.
To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry. There are so many great artists out there. And the goal is to make great movies, you know? So to be successful, quality is the best business plan as I always say.
It's not that I don't want to, it's just that there's no money in it. By that I mean the way the video business works now, the artist and the record label send out a song to a bunch of different directors and say, 'What would you do with this?' Then everyone has to come up with an idea and bid on it. For me, it's like, 'Hey, you want me to do it? Then pay me. I'm not auditioning for you.'
Artists are always searching for beauty - and when they find it and fashion it in their own unique way - it does not seem too important to analyze how it came about.
How can you measure the contribution that artists make to society?
Artists paint not for their own enjoyment but to share their vision with others.
There are artists who are writers, but there was no such thing as cartoons that were written by somebody who couldn't draw.
The impresario's job is to pick the right people who can pick the right people. He picks the people who can pick artists and relate to them. People who know what the market craves.
The traditional model for a company like Coca-Cola is to hire one big advertising agency and essentially outsource all of its creativity in that area. But Coca-Cola does not do it that way. It knows how to manage creative people and creative teams and it has been quite adept at building a network that includes the Creative Artists Agency in Hollywood, which is a talent agency.
I'm aware of being a stranger, an outsider, and that's always an advantage for an artist. It means I can see from the inside and the outside. I have that double vision.
We finally found out the technique of separating and getting information about where every train would be at any moment. Of course, I went over budget many times, because - as you go along - some things improved, and you get better ideas.
But Walt and him shared the same kind of optimism. Walt believed in himself, and he was optimistic about what he wanted to do. He just knew it will be okay, and Dali was the same way. They had a great deal in common that way.
We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.
Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life symbols.
This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.
I don't think that was too successful. Because I always thought that the two of them should have been more separate. Also I had planned the monorail station to be in the center. So that one day you would have go to World Showcase and then the other day to Future World.
I suppose that every time there is difficulty. I remember about Space Mountain: It took us ten years before we found the technology that would allow such a ride. And during these ten years, I had a model that I kept, waiting for the technology we needed.
