Natalie Merchant Quotes

You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.

Money is a never-ending problem.

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

I didn't get to train because I was raised by a single mom. There were three of us and it was just too expensive to pay for me to do martial arts practice.

Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.

I think part of making movies is dealing with restrictions of freedom and budget. I'd rather deal with restrictions of budget. It's better to feel free within any budget.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.

It's happened time and time again, but the committee has always decided against it-the work was too conservative or didn't fit within the budget; there are millions of different reasons.

I could not finance a movie on my own. Frankly, I could not even afford to take a year off. I, like most people in America, need to keep making money.

We didn't have money to put out everything we wanted to put out.

Often, people who want to make interesting films simply don't have the money to do it.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

I suppose the worst case scenario is that people will get to the point where they can't actually afford to make what they want to make creatively. The industry is collapsing.

Dealing with those personalities and the people who run this music thing has been most challenging. It's hard to really communicate things to people who run a business yet forget the nature of the business. They only look at the bottom line and the financial return, you know, they forget what it is they're packaging. It's art.

I'm a big believer in creating parameters for creativity. I think parameters make people more creative. So that starts with my budgets. I only do low budget movies, and I think that makes the movies better.

There is never enough money for TV.

You have to have a certain amount of limitations, I think, to make art and to make something that can be alive on film. Money can get in the way of that.

For me, making a record is a vacation. I'd like to do it more often. Just, chances are impossible... It's a very expensive hobby, you know?

Compared to TV, 'Palookaville' was restriction-free, except we had no money and no time.

It is weird because a lot of people don't realise, I would struggle for budget. There are moments with the people I work with sit there and think what have we got to do to make people realise that if Billy doesn't get sponsorship he won't be racing.

I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.

I found filmmaking to be a very practical art form. It's about figuring out how to create within the very practical limitations/constraints of time, money, and large groups of collaborators.

I remember when we were mixing our record and our manager was in there going, 'You guys need to sing more, so it can be on the radio.' And we were like 'What? We're never going to get played on the radio. Who cares? What are you talking about?'

Doing music to pay bills is an uncomfortable situation. I never wanted to be in that situation.