Questlove Quotes

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.

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?

If history doesn’t pass through to the people who occupy the highest offices, there’s bound to be trouble. A nation of ignorance holds us all back.

[Creativity] is about finding your own unique way of fitting into the continually repeating human experience.

You have to throw things away so that there is some value implied by the act of keeping other things.

I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I'm not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there's a real answer. Maybe life's a circle...

Whatever your personal preference, no matter how significant or how trivial, if it’s a source of pleasure, and in denying yourself that pleasure you’ll be entering a state where you think about it all the time, then you are working against your own creativity. You might think certain things are a distraction, but going without them can become a larger distraction if you are thinking all the time about the time when you will be returned to them, or them to you.

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.

Make your environment reflective of your tastes. Eliminate distractions, including the distraction of being without any of the distractions you need.

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.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

I wasn’t a normal kid.

My father used to say half-jokingly that there was a little concern over whether or not I was okay. Maybe it wasn’t a joke at all. The concern was about my personality, which seemed too eccentric. I don’t think “autistic” was a common term back then, but I later found out that they had taken me to a doctor to see if something was really wrong.

It wasn’t that I was violent or temperamental. In fact, my mom said it was a blessing because I never gave her trouble. It was the opposite — they knew exactly how to sedate me, which was to sit me in front of something that held my interest and then just leave. I’d develop a deep relationship with that thing, whether it was Soul Train or a record on a turntable. But that led to a secondary worry, which was that I was falling inward into some kind of trance. Once, when I was very young, my dad installed a light with a rotating shade around a lightbulb, one of those lamps that works like a kind of carousel. He pressed the switch that caused the shade to turn and, according to him, I just disappeared inside myself. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, and I didn’t seem any less interested in the rotating lamp. Then my parents started noticing a broader pattern of me trying to spin stuff. I would take my sister’s bike and watch the wheel go around and around. I would take my father’s records and twirl them on my finger. They had a moment where they thought I might be interested in cars, because I was driving the records like a steering wheel. That was my whole entertainment for a while there, but to my parents, it was almost like a bad habit that they wanted me to drop. But I haven’t dropped it, not at all. To this day, my life revolves around circles. My drums are circles. Turntables are circles. My logo or autograph, which I developed over the years through doodling, is composed of six circles. My life revolves around that shape.

It’s a world where we grapple all the time with our insignificance, where things happen around us and to us. Being creative, in whatever form, is the proof that we can leave an imprint on our surroundings, that we can make a mark on time. Even her expansion of the definition of art into politics “or something else” stays faithful to this idea of creativity. When we make something, we make something different.

Dare I hesitate to say that creativity might be in jeopardy because one of the key components of being creative is boredom and silence and isolation.

On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves’ drums away because they didn’t want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up — fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened.