Peter Saul Quotes

I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times.

I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me.

I just want to make something that is true to itself and that interests me; otherwise, how can I have the audacity to think it's going to interest anybody else?

I have always tried to put content in my work. It is a consistent challenge.

All we try and do is make the best films we can. If you do that then hopefully the audiences will come, and they have. Everything else is gravy.

When you're doing a series like this, you're constantly looking for new ways to excite your audience.

To make independent films, you can't think about them too much, ponder on them too much, get overwhelmed by the enormity of it.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

I'm not looking to be an artist to make money. I'm looking to be an artist.

I've never cared for the idea of a career path, or where a film might 'take me.' My love is for acting not money, so I only take on roles that I find challenging, in stories I find interesting.

I try to work on shows that I would want to watch.

I'm just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it's any good or not.

You try to find things that are challenging and interesting and hopefully it will be the same to the audience.

I don't know what an audience wants to see but I know what I like to see.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

I'm not trying to say I'm this artist who is all artsy and that I only write music for myself, because I don't. I write music for other people to enjoy, so I think about if it'd be an idea someone else would like.

As a viewer, that's work I respond to - work that I know is singular in some way. If I'm being challenged by something on screen, if I don't quite know why it's happening, I want to know I can do the work of pulling it apart and that there'll be something satisfactory about it. If the architecture is sound, you can be lyrical in execution.

At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.

I don't believe in making a record and rushing it.

I mean, I think about it, but I don't design my record to get a certain public response.

I don't write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

I can see me continuing to make the best music I can, and let the chips fall where they may.

My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It's getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart.

The worst thing you can do after a test screening is slash it for the lowest common denominator.