A Quote by Lionel Richie

Believe me, I love commerce as much as the rest of the readers of 'Businessweek.' But in art, you have to be true to yourself and your musical vision. People have known me well for a long time, so if I was chasing a trend and doing something that wasn't authentic to who I am, they would know it in just a few seconds.
if I love something I do it, and if I don't, I don't. I think that this is the most important choice that any of us can make in life, in art, in history: to do the thing you love. If you love it, it is important. If you love it then while you are doing it, you are a true expression of yourself and your time and your story. You are authentic. If you don't love it you betray not only yourself but also your history, your culture, your position in your society.
I am the anti-trend guy? I don't believe in chasing trends. And before anyone shops, I believe you benefit from doing a closet inventory. Ask yourself what am I wearing, what am I not wearing, and you'll probably discover things you didn't even know you had.
All I tell artists is, 'Do what you love. Never let anybody talk you into changing what your musical idea is just to try to get a hit, because you're chasing your tail that way. It's not going to happen, and if you're successful, you have to do it the rest of your life. Stay true to it and do it for the sake of the art.'
Just be true to yourself, and listen as much as one is able to to other people whose opinions you respect and look up to but in the end it has to come from you. You can’t really worry too much by looking to the left and the right about what the competition is doing or what other people in your field are doing. It has to be a true vision.
I do believe in God. But you won't find me visiting temples every now and then. I believe in self-realization. Peace of mind matters a lot to me. What's the point in doing something just for the sake of it? I'd rather do something I like doing as long as I'm being true to myself.
You can control yourself if you really want to. I'll tell you how I know you can control yourself. If you were in a full fledged emotional temper tantrum in your house and I knocked on your front door..... Come on! Let me tell you what, you would get control of yourself, and it would only take a few seconds.
To me acting is a hobby and I'm inspired by it. And if I'm going to spend time doing something that I'm not really inspired to do, then why am I doing it? I don't know if that sounds sort of new agey or whatever, but it's true. I've been lucky enough to have a musical career that has gone pretty good and acting is something I have always wanted to do.
I'd love to write full time. But it's not something that is due to me because I'm a writer. Times are very hard for doing the thing you love, but the payoff for not having much money is that you love your job. A balance would be good. But yes, given infinite funds, or a guaranteed regular income of some kind, I'd happily shut myself away and write stories for the rest of what I've got in me.
You know me better than anyone, and you're my best friend. I don't think there's anything you could say to me that would lead me to believe that you're doing it just to hurt me. If there's one thing I've come to know about you, it's that you're not even capable of something like that. Why do you think I like spending time with you so much? Because you're a good guy. A nice guy.
Art can mean a lot of things. At the heart of it, art is doing something you really believe in. Like my wife, she volunteers helping underprivileged kids, that's her art. To me, anything that you do that you truly believe in makes you an artist. It doesn't necessarily mean being a painter or a film maker. That's art, but there's more to it than that. As long as you're pouring your heart and soul into what you're doing, that's the weapon.
I know perfectly well that only in happy instants am I lucky enough to lose myself in my work. The painter-poet feels that his true immutable essence comes from that invisible realm that offers him an image of reality....I feel that I do not exist in time, but that time exists in me. I can also realize that it is not given to me to solve the mystery of art in an absolute fashion. Nonetheless, I am almost brought to believe that I am about to get my hands on the divine.
I see myself as life-sized, certainly not a supersized personality, and apparently after 30 years of television, that's what the audience thinks of me as well. I know this because for the first time in my career, I've just seen market research, and the thing I am known for is being authentic.
People ask, 'Why would you cast yourself in your movie?' And, for me, it's more like an achievement that I am now not playing all the parts, you know? Like I was for so long, in all my performances and a lot of my short movies. So, that's where I'm coming from, not out of a kind of actress-y sense of myself. I mean, I don't really see myself as an actress, but more from performance: this is how you make something. You do it yourself. You're in it and you write it. I think I keep doing it that way, 'cause it's my way. It's what makes me feel like I know how to do it.
I have to tell you, a few people had very controversial feelings about what I was doing with Gucci at the beginning, and now, after a couple of years, they are changing their minds. I want to give journalists the time and space to know me and what I'm doing better. But it's not a priority for me. At the end of the day, I am not an artist; I am not doing a performance; I'm doing things that need to be sold. And I know my job.
A cop told me, a long time ago, that there’s no substitute for knowing what you’re doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that’re any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.
Mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can't really describe - you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference. It is so in almost every art. We just don't understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don't know why. But I say it's certainly true of mathematics.
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