Questlove Quotes

Music has the power to stop time. When I listen to songs, I'm transported back to the moment of their birth, which is sometimes even before the moment of my birth. Old songs, rock or soul or blues, still connect with me because the human emotions in them, whether jealousy or rage or hope, are recognizably similar to the emotions that I'm feeling now. But I'm feeling all of them, all the time, and so the songs act like a chemical process that isolates certain feelings at certain times: maybe one song helps illuminate the jubilation and one helps illuminate the sorrow and one helps illuminate the resignation. Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.

That’s one thing about being creative. Don’t be too set in your own ways. Be suggestible from time to time. Allow unexpected influences (like Torr) to shift your ideas. You can always come back to your own convictions if they’re real. But be a tourist in other perspectives.

They permit themselves a wider range of ideas, even ones that might not apply to the situation at hand. The Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson calls this weirdness “cognitive disinhibition,” and thinks that it’s at the heart of all creativity. If we’re always discarding our thoughts to fit in with what’s acceptable, or correct, or accurate, we’re not going to have ideas that leap away from the ideas that are already there. That’s the first point.

You have to remember that you’re insignificant, but also that you are potentially more significant than all the noise that’s being supplied to you at every moment.

Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.

There was nothing wrong with it. But there wasn’t everything right with it.

Much later in life, I had a friend who tried to explain Roland Barthes to me; not all of it, of course, but that one little principle about how a text is not a unified thing, but a fragmentary or divisible thing, and that the reader is the one who divides it up, arbitrarily. Reading is the act that creates the pieces.

Someone once said that blues and gospel were fraternal twins, close in spirit, neither one wanting to admit how similar they looked.

Collaborations work best this way; when there's a mutual desire to see what the other side adds. You know that what you're making on your own has value but the sum is more than the parts and every part knows it.

I still don’t know if I am truly creative...At times I feel like I’m a way better student than I am teacher or maker.

Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fashion even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are?

When I really like something, I tend to never listen to it again. I want to remember the feeling even more than I want to remember the music. If you get that record back out, you risk learning that it’s not as good in reality as it is inside of you. Better to have the memory than to go back and have to adjust your truth. And even if it is every bit as good, you’re just going to deconstruct it. You’re going to use your brain instead of your feelings. As you get older, feelings are hard to come by. - Richard Nichols

Creative things happen to creative people, especially when they let themselves go to the Zen of the moment, when they don’t allow themselves to be paralyzed either by overthinking or by laziness.

There are studies in early child psychology that demonstrate that children have only their own perspective. If you put a doll across the table from them and ask them what the doll sees, they will tell you what they see. They know the doll is across the table, but they cannot imagine a perspective other than their own. How different are we?

And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.