Antony Hegarty Quotes

The creative process is just a process and you can't really separate it from life. Growing your hair is a creative process. Your body is creating hair. Being alive is a creative process. Whether it's growing something in the garden or growing a song, the material accumulates. It's the process of being alive; it's the passage of time. Things change.

My creative process isn't a long one, so I could have started a song 10 years ago and then finish it 10 years later. It's all just about pushing around words and melodies, for me. The material is kind of shape-shifting.

When I was a junior in college I moved to New York and went to this performance school the Experimental Theatre Wing. We had singing class and again, some of the other students would cry when I was singing, and I really didn't know why. I started to realize that there was something in the tone of my voice that was evocative for them.

I just feel like [creativity] is a reflection of the world around me and I don't think you can divorce yourself from that. So I don't really think in terms of, 'Do you still have it?' Even if I was doing something new, I think I would be engaged in the same process.

I was about 17 or 18 when I first started performing in public. I had a teacher when I was a freshman in college and she came up to me afterwards and said she had been crying while I had been singing, and it really shocked me.

Any woman who says she's not a feminist is just someone who's afraid of being penalised for saying she wants to advocate for women.

Diane Cluck is a virtuosic talent with an emotionality that feels at once ancient and alien. Her mastery of her voice as an ecstatic instrument is so compelling.

No matter how public your work is, it's just a relationship with yourself. And you have to create a little sacred space inside yourself to treasure that ... because when you die, that's still what you have. It's what you're born with and what you leave with. It's kind of a story of the way you accompanied yourself through your life.

Everyone has a spectrum of masculinity and femininity inside them. In every individual, a war of misogyny is raging. Every man is repressing and oppressing the femininity within themselves, raising up male values as governing values. Because that's what we've been taught to do, just as every woman has. Misogyny isn't just something that affects women. It affects men.

Every interview is as much an impression of the journalist as it is the artist or subject. You look at interviews and you see a portrait of two people. The worst thing that can happen is if you're misquoted and then that quote is misquoted. That does drive one crazy. The most embarrassing thing is when your words are misrepresented or sometimes you say something stupid and you live to regret it.

History has been male and the future is female. Leaning on women as a body and the female archetype, and not just women but men - we're asking men to dig deep and deconstruct their seat of privilege. Because this is an emergency. We're in threat of losing our homes, the future of our future generations, and the biological paradise that we're apart of. It's in the interest of all people that we lean on the feminine archetype in our movement forward.

I think what really separates artists from the rest of the world is that artists feel like they have permission to keep exploring and expressing their process. Most people censor that because they don't think it's good enough. Everything is measured against this patriarchal hierarchy of value, as if one person's singing voice is more important than another's.

I think what everyone can do is start creating spaces and forums, talk to peers, friends and family, and start deconstructing these things we take for granted, unpack these old systems, in order to understand ourselves more deeply, to understand why we do the things we do and how our privileges affect other people's lack of privilege.

I think what holds people up in creative processes is the expectation of what it is they're doing. It's also the sense of judgement, you know, people editing themselves.

There are so many more productive things to do than sit around feeling shame and guilt. Beyond touching on shame and guilt in a perfunctory manner, I wouldn't bother with that at all.

You need to release yourself of any expectation of what that material should be. Just start letting it be what it's naturally evolving into, even if it means just pulling words out of the dictionary and laying them one after another. Words are everywhere.