Gunter Grass Quotes

I stay true to my lyrics. If I go back and look at them in hindsight, the emotions I had when I wrote them have passed. It feels unjustified to change them.

Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.

I'm not just painting for painting's sake. I want to be truthful.

If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process.

I really believe in not compromising your art. I feel like I've never compromised my art.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.

As far as the creative process goes, I always make sure that anything that gets discussed or talked about in the record is true to form. I make it a point not to sing anything that I haven't felt or gone through.

I've heard some people say that I'm selling out, but I'm not. If I hadn't done 'Black Radio', and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldn't be honest with myself; I'd be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up the cracks.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

I feel some kind of duty to be really, really honest as a writer. The same is true of my songwriting.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

I hope that when people see my body of work, they will say, 'That brother dropped it for real on us, even at the expense of his own image.'

It's good to please the network, but you really just have to tell the stories you want to tell, and if you try to please other people, it ends up starting to water stuff down. Those decisions we have to make are hard, but we usually just err on the side of 'What would we want to see?'

If I can't be honest with music, forget it.

I think, as a filmmaker, it's important to be honest with yourself at all times in terms of what's working and what's not.

I think, in general, as a writer, you can't really hide your values. They're always going to fall out onto the page, and I tend to trust that I don't have to force my ideals into the expression of what's going to happen naturally.

I've got a long list of things I consider to be selling out. But amongst that list, one of them is when you make art without putting your guard down.

I feel like there's a lot of pressure on artists to be 100-percent organic all the time.

I would love for my existence as an artist to be completely about my art - not about my social media, or what I do vs what's cool right now, or even whether or not I sound okay in an interview.

Rozay is an artist himself so he understands the importance of being true to your work.