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.

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

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

…Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years. I’m probably trendier now as a 42-year-old than I’ve ever been…

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.

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.

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.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

In general, I don’t like to blame the creators. They are making work that appeals to them and the people in the room with them. They are making something that is, at some level, genuine. But the distributors, the networks that bring art to the population, they are the ones who ensure that there’s a flattening and narrowing. The younger me may have sat up all night with bandmates raging against Puffy or DMX or whoever, but the fact is that they were never the problem. The problem was that someone in the corporate chain of command felt that there was a need to play those songs fourteen times a day and to eliminate alternatives.

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

I worry that it’ll be harder for the present generation to process memory, because they have so many options to choose from, and most aren’t shared in a physical space.

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?

Sometimes I think I’m restrained by information — that I’m too focused on the finer points of things, too detail-minded, unable to free myself from the hold of other people’s work.

Switching off perfection switched on the human quality

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.