Jim James Quotes

You cannot please all of the people all of the time, and that is truer in the arts than anywhere else.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

Criticism is something that you have to take, regardless of what you do. Even if you go out there and try to make the most vanilla, non-offensive TV show possible, people are going to criticize you for doing that. It's just part of the game.

As an artist, you do understand you're never going to please everybody.

I have not given much credence to reviews of my films. Sometimes they're wrong, but it didn't matter to me.

I never really think about what people are going to think of the movie afterwards. Or what people are going to call me. I just want to make a great project, and my focus is really all on that. And then I really don't read reviews. Like, you know, go on comment boards or anything.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them, but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

Every time you do something, people are going to like it, people are going to hate it. You tend to make the movies on the basis you are making them for the people who are going to like them and not worrying too much about people who don't like them.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

I really wanted a No. 1 single from my first album, but I would not do anything different. It was real and honest and I didn't pretend anything.

I think I learned very quickly after I started putting out music... you just learn that people are going to take what they want and make it fit their agenda or make it fit their interpretation. And you make peace with that or you suffer forever.

I've come to realize that you're going to get criticized no matter what. Somebody will always hate what you write, especially if you write humor for a fairly broad audience. Somebody will always find it not funny and declare you're not funny anymore. And sometimes people are just crazy.

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

You know, the radio never wanted you to speak about anything, so the music is kinda influenced by the hands of the radio which wants to homogenize it and dilute it and sanitize it. And for the most part, nobody's takin' the time to seek out the cats that are still tryin' to talk, so they have a difficult time being heard.

I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

The precision of hisskill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

The cliché of that sort of wasted, renegade, drugged-out musician of the '70s is kind of dead and gone now. And I suppose that a lot of people still keep relying on that, or some kind of image to perpetuate something that they think they're supposed to sound like. But that kind of takes you away from real inspiration and, you know, real artistic discovery of the individual.

It's always disappointing when people decide for one reason or another that they don't like your work anymore, but you can't try to please people, because then you're just going to be doing - you'll never live it down, y'know it'll always be dogging you around - you might be being a fake about the whole thing.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.