Bo Burnham Quotes

I think the biggest thing that people fear when it comes to art becoming a business is those authentic, pure aspirations of art being compromised.

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 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.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

If you were to hold me to a standard of, 'What are you doing, singing about a scratch-off ticket at your level of success?' then my music's gonna be ridiculous.

As an artist, you want to make good stories and create good art; as a businessman, you want to make money and make sure the investors are happy. The two will always clash, unfortunately.

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.

What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

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

You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn't pay the bills.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

Despite a lot of people thinking that everything gets more and more difficult, I always assumed that people are going to be "Oh, at last you buckled, you're trying to be commercial."

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

I don't feel any pressure at all because I don't care. That's an occupational hazard... but if you're doing anything of any worth, and not doing something that's safe and anodyne and trying to be populist and a national treasure, then you've got to assume that as many people hate what you do - and you - as like what you do and like you.

People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!

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.

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't.

I think the movies that don't try to please people are movies that you respect more in the end.

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

Any band that is out there chasing it is doing more destruction to music then someone who is out there playing what they truly feel.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

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.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.