Mahira Khan Quotes

I think the line is where you're in the studio, you're creating. That belongs to you as an artist. Nothing should taint that. I shouldn't be thinking about what the fans want, I shouldn't be thinking about what the radio wants, what the label wants, what your manager wants, a song for the chicks, a song for the street.

My work is drawn to the political but avoids an agenda. There is no inherent critique or support.

My concern is to continue respecting my work as I've done since I began as an actor and I could only do that if I'm strong enough to keep on doing what I think best in an artistic way.

The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.

I would prefer not to be involved in party politics.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

I think the moment you start trying to please a fan base is when you start going downhill. I'm going to always, always write about what I want, even if it doesn't necessarily cater to most of them.

When you're in a songwriting class, and you write a song, and you hand it in to a teacher to grade, I'm still going to say that it's a really awesome song whether I got an A or a D. I learned to stick to my guns and take the tools as tools and not as rules.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

We've never written anything to have success with it. We've written songs that we love.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

One of the worst things that can happen to an artist is to perceive himself as the owner of his art, and art as his tool. A product of the marketplace sensibility, this attitude barely differs on a psychological plane from the patron's view of the artist as a paid employee.

I don't read anything about my movies before or after I do films, or any part of show business. I think that keeps me in a kind of place where I can do the work that I need to do.

Every creator has to follow what they believe. That's the message I would love for every single executive to get, to clearly understand, and every single producer out there.

I was always a bit concerned about purity of essence. I never wanted a job that might affect the way I wrote or thought.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

When I was on the big labels, I never calculated what would make me sell more records. I just did what I did -no different than when I wrote songs for myself in high-school.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

I only want to make movies I want to see. That may mean my career is somewhat limited, but that is my version of integrity. No matter how it performs or how it's received, I can be okay with it.

I'm selfish, I think. I think an artist has to be. I'm not worried about what people think. I play the parts that I find interesting. It'd bother me more to be just pigeonholed into doing what people think is ethical or that's boring to me. I don't pick parts with that in mind, I just find interesting stories. If it's interesting to me, then I do it.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.