I talk a lot about kindness and gratitude and how those two things can bring us into the present moment and how present moment awareness is key to being not only a good artist but a good person. And we don't just get hired because we have this tremendous talent, we get hired because we're the whole package. People can sense that throughout the day we are in the practice of taking care of others and certainly for a new work you know you're going to be in the room developing with this team, this family, for years and years and years so the energy that you bring into the room has to be something that you practice throughout the day.

One must be an artist before he can create-that I knew.

I think to be an artist it means a certain sensitivity, because I believe in evolution. I believe the more sensitive you are the more you draw from this One Mind; which is part of the whole, part of everything. I think we all have that ability to be tuned in, but I think great artists are just more tuned in. One who's expressing God to the fullest, that's an artist.

To become an artist you have to be curious.

However, as Rwandans, we need to realise that there is more that we can do to contribute to the life of an artiste.

To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar. To allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the question “Why?” To be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property, and prestige strikes you as just a little silly.

To be an artist, you look, you perceive, you recognize what is going through your mind. And it is not ideas. Everything you feel and everything you see and everything that your whole life goes through your mind, you know. But you have to recognize it and go with it and really feel it.

Remember: you must participate in the creative world you want to become part of.

Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map — these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.

Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving — thats what's useful for art.

There’s no bouncer, no gatekeeper, and no barrier to entering these scenes: You don’t have to be rich, you don’t have to be famous, and you don’t have to have a fancy résumé or a degree from an expensive school. Online, everyone — the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur — has the ability to contribute something.

Art should help you to navigate the real challenges of being a human being.

Being an artist is this kind of occupation in which you have to make people care about your obsession.