Questlove Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

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.

Part of me would just like to relax and have one job that pays me the amount I need to survive. And another part of me wants the creativity that comes out of struggle and frustration and fear. It's a never-ending cycle, which must be how I want it, on some level.

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

Sitting there at one twenty in the afternoon in a maroon Chrysler, I told myself that I had to cherish that magical moment, because there was no guarantee that I would never again know what it felt like to hear that for the first time.

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?

A lot of us are afraid that we’ll get found out as normal. The reason why bodyguards and velvet ropes really exist is mainly because a lot of celebrities don’t want you to know how normal and regular they are…

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.