Margaret Cho Quotes

I'm down to sell records but not my soul.

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

As artists, we'd all love to not be commercial - to not sell out to the full extent that we are able. But you do what you have to do to pay New York rent and continue to do what you feel strongly about.

It breaks my heart to see these young, really talented bands getting chewed up into the system. I remember a time if you'd signed to a major label it was such a sell out! But now... unless you've signed to a big label, you're a failure now.

I know in my soul when something feels like a sell out and I think for me, I knew that if I did the Jane's Addiction reunion thing, that I would feel like a sell out. That's how it would feel to me.

If you want to capitulate to what commercial needs are, you can always be commercially valuable, but I'm not interested in being that.

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

If I'm going to sell out, I'm going to sell out all the way, so a bid by the studio would be if you're going to go through the pain of trying to make a film, it's gotta be worth it.

I don't want to be in somebody else's movie, and then they make all the money. I've gotten offers to do the movies, but I won't sell myself short and be in somebody else's movie, like 'Boyz N the Hood.' I don't think I woulda done that.

The press is just not your friend when it comes to a marriage. That's why we didn't sell the pictures of our wedding, and we got offered millions of dollars for them, millions.

There's no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don't try to adapt it, make it commercial.

Unfortunately, music devolved instead of evolved. The music business got into the hands of lawyers and accountants rather than the entrepreneurial creative people, and that's when the beginning of the end started. It's all based on money instead of art and creativity.

I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy.

I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had.

I've tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I'll try to tailor-make it.

I'm a stand-up comic. I'm always doing dates; it's just that, if I'm working on a project or I'm busy, I can't get out on the road or book any shows. Since the beginning of my career, I'm usually out for at least 10-15 dates throughout the year. If I have time, then I try to get at least 30-40 dates.

I think I became less literary after I sold more!

It's appealing to me to get to be in a commercial film without feeling like I sold out.

When I started off as an actor, the last thing I wanted to do in the world was make money. I was under the impression, when I started off as an actor, that the more money I made, the more it would diminish from my creativity and my capacity to be an artist.

We started to overthink things in the Dixie Chicks and do things we thought people wanted us to do.

If anything, I feel a bit of pressure to write about less disenfranchised people, because I'd probably sell more books that way and would've already had some hot property that I could've sold to Hollywood.

That's just the music industry. They always want you to write something like the one that was popular.

I have this memory of being 15 years old, sitting with a friend on the steps of a little bookstore on Bloor Street in Toronto and saying, 'I'll never take money for my writing!' I had such idealism about this idea of trading your soul for money.

I'm never gonna sell my soul or violate myself for no amount of dollars or fame.

Obviously, I would like to play to bigger audiences and have a bit more success, but not if I have to commercialize.