A Quote by Ben Vereen

The stage sharpened my creative instrument and encouraged me to go deeper and try new things. — © Ben Vereen
The stage sharpened my creative instrument and encouraged me to go deeper and try new things.
I never know what I'm going to say as I walk up to the microphone. I try to be in the moment. I try to go deeper into myself. I discover things on stage that I don't discover off stage about me.
My dogs have helped me enjoy things that I wasn't good at before. They've encouraged me to be more active and creative.
Science is actually, I think, a very creative venture. It requires thinking outside of the box. It requires an ability to be open to new experiences and an ability to change course in the middle, try a different path, or go about things in a new way.
If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me.
I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.
That's the real endeavor: to try to create that direct conduit from the pure consciousness of your creative voice to the person who's a craftsman who can go into the world and consistently deliver new things worth paying attention to.
It's so important as a creative person to go out and look for things. Go to galleries, talk to people, read books. Yes, you can just type something into Google, but if you read and interact, you'll have a deeper understanding of the world.
What I do on stage, you won't catch me doing off stage. I mean, I think deep down I'm still kind of, like, timid and modest about a lot of things. But on stage, I release all that; I let it go.
My parents encouraged us to commit to things, so if we wanted to learn an instrument, it was all the grades and all the theory.
My parents encouraged me to be creative by being creative and interesting people themselves, and by making it clear how highly they valued creativity in others.
I was just so fortunate to have parents who encouraged me to try things and do what I wanted.
When I was little, I would open up lawnmowers and try to make them go faster. I wasn't strong enough to do some things, so I'd wait for my dad to get home from work to help me. He was great, but he never really encouraged me, and I'll be the same if I have kids: I'll leave them to do their own thing.
I'm definitely a vintage collector. I have a wardrobe of core basics that I like to spice up with different colors, new accessories, and I love to try on new things to invite something different. I find, with every new stage of my life, my self-image shifts with new duties and responsibilities, and so does my fashion style.
For me, every time I step on the stage it feels like a battle is about to start. It's not like we're going on stage to fight against our audience obviously, because for me, when I go on stage, I'm always trying to reach a new level of how am I going to make today a great night for everyone that's present.
The luster of an experience can actually go up with time. So, learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.
I listen to other guitar players, yeah. It gives me new concepts and shows me where the instrument is going for the future and it is going some places. There are some musicians who are really putting out a good vibe with new theories. I try and keep up.
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