Hal Price Quotes

I don't ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, 'It sounds good!' It's got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

Never try to make the same record twice, even when people are screaming for the same sound.

I think people who make movies and have invested a lot of money in them, get frightened that if they challenge an audience they are going to repel them. And I think the opposite it's really true. It takes confidence and courage to know that and then commit to it.

I never imagined myself doing a one-man show. If I'm going to do one, I'd rather do one that breaks all the rules.

When it comes to storytelling, not taking risks is riskier than swinging for the fences. I have very simple ambitions when it comes to taking risks in storytelling and programming. I try very hard to avoid the expected.

I believe that a creative career is only as good as the risks that you take with it.

I admire actors who are bold and try to go forward over the cliche and propose something original to the audience.

In the world of creativity, laziness translates into an inability to be rigorous enough to create fearlessly. It makes us plagiarise or water our creativity down to make it more acceptable to the public.

No film should try to follow a trend, and do what film people think the public wants. There's no such thing as knowing what the public wants.

I feel so much more comfortable when I'm working on material which makes other people scratch their heads and ask, 'You're going to make a musical out of that?'

What I really like doing is taking risks, musically.

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

That's the thing about musicians: The priority is to create something new that's never been before. And you put your life on the line every time that you play.

If all you're doing is playing it safe - trying to make the same movie over and over again - that's when the audiences say, 'Oh, this is just a moneymaking machine.' But if it's genuinely in service to the art form, then the franchise concept is being used in a way that's exciting.

I think if you don't risk something in art, it's not really important.

People are fed up of formula films, and we are getting new space to experiment.

I suppose that I'm excited by exciting theater. It takes a risk to show us the world in a new way.

I always look for projects that are risky and ones that want to do something unique. If audiences don't like it, you feel good knowing that you were brave enough to do something original. If they do like it, you feel like everyone is rewarded, because we all got to see something new.

I'm saying nobody's got the guts to be a J. Cole. Nobody's got the guts to be a Kendrick Lamar. We need more of them... Everybody wants to go the easy route.

You hear it said time and time again by successful directors: You have to make a movie for yourself. Don't make it for anyone else. My style of filmmaking happens to be give the audience what they know they don't want, but they want. Ultimately I have to write and direct in a way that let's just say, you don't want to regret making a choice.

HBO does something that most networks don't do which is give a show a chance to find their voice.

When you say, 'Man, what kind of music does Outkast make?' You be like, 'They make Outkast music.' What kind of music does N.E.R.D. make? They make N.E.R.D. music. I want to be one of those people, because there's so many layers to the music I create that I don't want people to expect me to do one thing.

I don't think any other place puts out music with no promise of success and still works like Baltimore.

As an actor, I have always believed that content is the king, and I have always put my neck on the line to choose cinema that is off the beaten track.

I've never consciously done 'safe' commercial projects; luckily, they have done well.