Whit Stillman Quotes

There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, 'Hey, let's just make money,' because it doesn't work when you do it that way. If you are aiming for that, forget it.

I would rather die than be a serious artist, or a fake artist.

I don't have this feeling like, 'Oh, I want to live in the United States and make movies and become famous just because the money is here.' I like to make movies that tell stories that I care about.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

It's such a hard thing to write a song for your fans without sounding naff and thanking them for spending money on you.

When you're making pictures out of heartfelt passion, it hurts when someone calls them a calculated business move.

You can't intellectually purge yourself of who you are. Whatever that is, it's going to come out in the wash, the film wash. What you are is going to be relevant, if not to yourself, to the movies you make.

The world is so caught up in the 'American Idol' idealistic sort of tendency in regards to just thinking that this whole thing is what everybody wants, but it doesn't help you make a better record.

Before, you only had one Public Enemy and one Rakim and one Salt 'N' Pepa. Now, people have got the formula, and some of them are just doing it for the cheque. It's kind of watered down.

What was exciting to me in talking to Kogonada was I was just very convinced that he was a very real and pure artist. He was so uninterested in the commercial game.

I think the key for any kind of artist - and this transcends music - is a certain degree of authenticity and sincerity.

Hopefully, by the time I do a project, I already have a true understanding and love of what I'm about to do because if I don't, I'm not going to work on that project. I really want to have those connections so I can be truthful to the emotional aspect of what I have to deliver for the story.

I just want to be an artist that makes exactly what he feels.

There are still recording artists out there doing things for the right reason, but a lot of people seem to be just driven by fame.

I think the biggest thing that people fear when it comes to art becoming a business is those authentic, pure aspirations of art being compromised.

And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

How few writers can prostitute all their powers!

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.

You know when somebody really knows what they're drawing from and you can feel it when you see the movie.

People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.