Questlove Quotes

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.

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.

There's species-wide programming and then there's individuality. The overlap between those two opens up a space for creativity. Live in that space. I'm here too. Maybe I'll see you around sometime.

I have thought often about how history happens twice: once when an event actually occurs and once when people discover that it has occurred. That second time is the first time for them, because they didn’t know about the first time.

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

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.

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

I jumped in the river and there’s piranhas and sharks, but I have a 500-foot lead on them.

Switching off perfection switched on the human quality

The question marks were piling up and I wasn't even ?uestlove yet. But Amir had questions, too, and the fishhook of the punctuation wasn't catching anything, and it wasn't straightening out either.

No one aspires to be the working man. Everyone aspires to be The Man.

Think of all the different ways that stories get told. I’m working with the James Brown people on a movie that will end up being the closest thing to a biopic that can possibly exist for a man like that, who was actively working for fifty years. The story is too big to tell straight on through, so they decided to deal with it by breaking it into five different episodes, five representative short stories.

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

There are now apps that let you change your onscreen face in real time before you take selfies. This can’t be helped. People who are purely presentational will remain that way. I’m more worried about the effect on creative people. The goal of creativity may be to learn to present yourself to others, in part, but it’s not to present yourself at the expense of truth. The second you become your own product, you’re heading down a chute rather than up a ladder.

Deciding what you’re not before you decide what you are lets you stand strong in your own category.