Bryan Lee O'Malley Quotes

I like to make the music that I really love. You're supposed to make your favorite music that no one else played, and I'd like to just keep it at that and not really change it at all.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Just trying to be different - when I hear something - I don't like to go trampling on other people's sounds.

I am not bothered with whether my characters are conventional or not. Because I am not in this for the designer labels and the autographs.

Art should be able to be innovative without compromising itself. That's why I believe artists should have bigger preoccupations than checking the price tags on their work or becoming curators' darlings.

My goal is to not fit in. My worst nightmare is being the baby version of another artist.

I don't care about the underground, even if that's where I'm currently residing sonically.

I dont ever want to do anything mediocre. I hear the music in the charts and I dont mean to be rude, but those people have no soul. Learning from music is like eating a meal - you have to pace yourself. You cant take everything from it all at once. I want to be different, definitely. Im not a one trick pony. Im at least a five-trick pony.

I'm never trying to be commercial or accessible, or saying "let's do this weird stuff, but at the same time we gotta do this safe stuff".

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

I feel like I've given up a lot of my fantasies. I just want to do things differently, and to a lot of people that's annoying. I like weird stuff. I always hoped if we had a big success it would be on our own terms.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.

If I was singing like somebody else, then it was almost like I was expressing myself like somebody else. So it was always a very original thing for me. It's my voice, it's my diary, it's the way I connect with people.

In drawing, I don't erase. I believe the original gesture has to be the best.

When you make a record, your own record, and you don't even recognize it yourself, it's hard to think if anybody else is going to recognize.

It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. Stop settling for what's good enough and start creating art that matters.

[My music] is opposite to fashion.

Usually it seems like either you sacrifice something and a lot of people will pay attention, or you stay true to yourself and appeal to a smaller group of people, but now we've managed to do what we felt was the right thing to do in our heart and had it reach a wide audience. It feels very rare.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

Instead of exhibiting talent in the hope that the world would forgive their eccentricities, they have exhibited only their eccentricities, in the hope that the world would give them credit for talent.

I am an artist who's just tryin' to do something different, and basically not caring about everybody's opinions and wanting to follow what everybody else is doing. At the same time, I know when to be serious, but I know when to joke.

If I was concerned about being accepted, I would have been doing Ansel Adams lookalikes, because that was easily accepted. Everything I did was never accepted...but luckily for me, my interest in the subject and my passion for the subject took me to the point that I wasn't wounded by that, and eventually, people came around to me.

I wasn't interested in fabricating things and altering what I did to make hit records.

I tended not to be concerned about whether a song was going to be a hit when I wrote it. Because it became evident that none of us knew what was a hit and what wasn't. So I thought if I just write what I like, why shouldn't people like what I like?