Jerrod Carmichael Quotes

I did get offers from Hollywood, but they were all scripts with monsters in them. If I had done them, I would have disappeared. I would have come back to France anyway, and I would have had to start all over again and lost a lot of time.

I love to work anywhere, but because there is so much attention after 'The Square' my three agents wanted me to quit the play when I did it. I refused as I thought it was an interesting and brilliant play, and I didn't just want to run straight off to Hollywood.

I turned down a lot of parts, and I ate a lot of canned tuna for dinner because I was just like, 'No, I don't want to do that; no, that's awful.' But sticking to my guns paid off, and I can look back now and be proud that I refused to take any stereotypical Asian parts.

I think it's a real danger, as an actor, when you try to make some statement through your career about what the business should be doing or ultimately what your image should be or how you want to be perceived. I look at every project that comes along and say, "Is this something I can sink my teeth into and can do a good job on?" That's really how I choose roles.

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 don't need to edit names out of songs and I don't need to edit details out of my songs because I've always been able to be honest with my music. That's the one place where I'm never ever going to change how I do things.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

If it’s a pure expression of yourself no matter what it is or what medium, it’s going to shine. It’s going to resonate. You could look inside of yourself and you could have a canvas and you could paint a dot in it, but if that is where your creative purpose is taking you then it needs to be that dot.

Hopefully people will be reinventing comedy forever and ever. This is just what I do, and it's a type of comedy.

I'm not an industry artist - I'm an artist in the industry.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye.

I didn't want to take the typical action roles that everybody was expecting me to take, because I was going to get typecast as that guy, the action guy who didn't have anything really bright to say and who just kicked in doors and punched people in the face and shot people and drove off in a cool car. I didn't want to be that guy.

You have to be able to give the people what you want in your way. And that's how you, to me, become a person that they love and not just a fly-by night actor.

It's a great privilege just to be in a film not because you're some packaging that some agent has done with the studio exec: "We need a John Travolta film."

I had no regrets when I did it, I have even less regret now because I can't imagine staying on the West Wing show and then, six weeks later, Aaron Sorkin leaving.

The only real failure is trying to second-guess the taste of an audience. Nothing comes out of that except a kind of inward humiliation.

I understand that a lot of other actors don't have a choice. They have to eat so they need to work and they'll do films that they're not so proud of. But I've been fortunate enough to be given a second wind, so I try to pick projects I know will provide the audience the kind of escapism they want from me.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

An actor that tells you that they have real choices between material is, for the most part, lying. There are very few people that have opportunities. But what you do have where I am in my career, is saying no to the things that seem repetitious. For me, I always look for material that allows me to bring my worldview to it. And those opportunities, since the beginning of The Shield, have grown exponentially.

I dislike judging myself, but I will say I would be wealthy today if I had accepted all the films that have been offered to me with large sums of money. But I've always refused, in order to do what I felt like doing.

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist...You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

I'm not limited by genre and it doesn't really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity.