If I wanted to make a quick buck, there's far easier ways of doing it. What I want is to provoke people. If you want a hit song, all you need to do is rewrite an old song. It might have been proven to work, but you won't be remembered the same way.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of originality over commercial success.
Avicii highlights the importance of creativity and the desire to provoke thought rather than simply chasing profit. He suggests that while it might be easier to produce something commercially successful by rehashing existing ideas, true artistry and innovation will leave a more lasting legacy.
In practice
In a speech about music and creativity, I might say, 'As Avicii once put it, 'If I wanted to make a quick buck, there's far easier ways of doing it.'
I love finding out-of-the-box inspirations and blending them with what I've done in the past. And when I started to experiment with genres, it didn't sound forced. Maybe that's because it's all music that I listened to growing up, and it's all music that I love.
Life's a game made for everyone, and love is the prize.
A lot of work and thinking goes into my DJing. I want the entire night to progress seamlessly and when I have to adapt the energy on the fly for the crowd on any given night, I can do so with harmonic mixes that I've practiced over and over again. I am far from the only DJ that does this and it's something I take pride in being able to do.
I don't really look at the charts at all. If anything, I try to out-do what I've done before. I try to make music that I like and I trust my own judgement with what will work with a wider audience. If you compare yourself to the charts, you lose perspective on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
Every natural action is graceful.
All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.
I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film.
Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.
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