Questlove Quotes

"Rich said, "As your get older, feelings are harder to come by." It was so simple and poignant."

One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don't really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2's Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study?

creative people are always having ideas. That’s not the trick. The trick is learning how to capture them without being captured by them,

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Deciding what you're not before you decide what you are let's you stand strong in your own category

Pay attention to seeds. We’re back to botanical metaphors here. Big ideas grow from those little things. Writers tend to be people who are sensitive to words. Artists are sensitive to color and line. If you want to encourage your own creativity, try to pay attention to the creative acts of others. More than that: try to pay attention to the ways in which the things that you didn’t think of as creative acts are actually perfect examples of creativity.

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.

When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.

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.