Art & Creativity Quote by John Zorn

Zorn is describing a creative practice that looks less like solitary genius and more like predatory curiosity in the best sense: he hunts for sparks. The phrase "run around" isn’t casual filler; it’s a self-portrait of restlessness as method. In a downtown New York ecosystem where scenes mutate fast and prestige calcifies faster, staying in motion is how you keep your ears sharper than your résumé.

"Gases me" is telling, too. It’s slangy, bodily, almost juvenile: inspiration as a physiological jolt rather than a refined judgment. That choice quietly rejects the composer-as-priest posture. Zorn’s not presenting himself as an arbiter of taste; he’s admitting to being thrilled, knocked off balance. The subtext is that taste is active, not declarative: you don’t just like things, you chase them down and make them collide with your own work.

The second sentence is basically a manifesto for scene-building. "Go out of my way" frames collaboration as deliberate labor, not networking-as-ambition. He’s describing an ethic of circulation: if you discover someone electrifying, you don’t just applaud; you redistribute opportunity by pulling them into your orbit or stepping into theirs. That’s how Zorn’s wider output makes sense - the labels, the curated bills, the endless recombination of players across projects. It’s less about genre loyalty than about maintaining a living commons where the new can be heard before it gets market-tested into dullness.