Louis MacNeice Quotes

I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.

I sometimes think it's better to go with a bad movie that is true to a certain point of view than to take something and make people try to like it when they're not supposed to.

You can't be trying to make a film that pleases all people, you know, so it's not a concern of mine.

I'm not making films just to be bold.

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up.

The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It's restrictive. It's a constant struggle, but if you give in, you're just making cottage cheese, and that's the end of it.

Everybody wanted me to be rich and famous on my art. And I said no to all the commercials and all the seedy offers.

There's no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don't try to adapt it, make it commercial.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

If an artist is going to take money from the taxpayers I guess he's got to be prepared to have the taxpayers dissatisfied with the product.

I will never permit myself to give in to American taste and lower the standards of art.

If you start adapting to audiences, you're really second-guessing the situation, and it becomes a bit more like cabaret.

I want to be choosier. I can't let quality take a back seat... not after 'Kaaka Muttai.'

I don't think that independent or off-beat films are not commercial, nor do I want to categorise them. At the end of the day, what matters is how much you compromise to please the masses. But, I am not someone who loves compromising. If there's a lot to give up on things that matter to me, I start losing interest.

If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't.

If you want to be an entertainer and just keep your audience happy, that's one thing. But to be an artist, I think, means ultimately primarily pleasing yourself, and in that respect, you constantly have this sense of confronting the expectations of your audience.

Rahman is very very director friendly. He is ever ready to go whichever the director wants, the story wants, depending on the kind of movie or the music you want, and within that he finds his niche. It is a constantly complementary process. At the end of the day he is not pleasing you, he has to please himself.

You can't make a film for your personal satisfaction. That is why I detest the cinema of people like Mani Kaul.

There's a difference between making the music for a check vs. what you think you should be doing artistically and creatively.

I don't make films for critics, and I'm not particularly interested in what they have to say, and they don't have a bearing on my audiences.

I'm trying to do work that makes meaning and sense to me and the audience. But I have no qualms. I'm always willing to be a part of commercial cinema.

As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.