Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
I know that Madonna is not a first-time filmmaker, but I have worked with a lot of first time filmmakers and I have worked with a lot of inexperienced film directors so that never has particularly worried me - I find it quite exciting - but I have never worked with a director who has had so little experience of directing who was so prepared.
People often ask me, 'How do you go about choosing who to feature on Into The Gloss?' And I've never had a great answer. Ultimately, I think the #1 thing that draws me to someone is their sense of freedom.
Leibniz believed in freedom, both divine and human, and he thought that contingency was a necessary condition of freedom. That is, if an agent A acts freely when choosing X, then A's choosing X cannot be necessary. But there are some elements in his philosophy that seem to make contingency impossible.
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s; it's choosing the ones you want.
For me, life is about being positive and hopeful, choosing to be joyful, choosing to be encouraging, choosing to be empowering.
It is you who are choosing, in any moment, to be happy or choosing to be sad, or choosing to be angry, or forgiving, or enlightened, or whatever. You are choosing.
I like photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall... The point is to be uninteresting.
I've tried singing like somebody else, and it never worked for me. The only thing that has ever worked for me was me being me, so either you love it or not.
I think Jive was just a shady label that they didn't want artists in the same room like, 'Hey, what you making?' Like I never worked with R. Kelly, I never worked with Q-Tip. I never worked with anybody that was on Jive. I never did a song with KRS-One.
Freedom! you askin me about freedom. I'll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn't than about what it is, 'cause I've never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is.
I think sometimes people haven't really quite worked out how to peg me, or exactly what it is that I do. In that way, I feel lucky that I can get to play different things because they haven't quite decided what I am.
I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is someway.
Asking “Am I choosing from my divinity or am I choosing from my humanity? “ opens the door for us to experience realms of reality that we may never have visited before.
Freedom comes with the impossibility of choosing.
I'm trying to mediate between individual agency and structural determination. I accept that people make individual choices, quite thoughtful, quite careful, quite difficult choices, but they don't make them without constraints that shape what choices are possible and provide the intensity of the push toward choosing.