Rob Marshall Quotes

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.

I think if you try to tailor your act to anybody, you end up with an act that doesn't work anyway.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

The only real failure is trying to second-guess the taste of an audience. Nothing comes out of that except a kind of inward humiliation.

Any cartoon that can be liked by a committee is really not worth drawing; in fact, must not be drawn at all! Better to become a stockbroker.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run.

The biggest difference between me and other artists out there is that they'll put anything out to sell a record or sell a ticket.

If you go to Hollywood, you've already sold out.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It's restrictive. It's a constant struggle, but if you give in, you're just making cottage cheese, and that's the end of it.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

Well, the stuff that has become more commercial doesn't have any edge.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio, I don't think the second option is some big sellout.

I'm not interested in doing something edgy with a capital E just so everyone knows, 'Oh, OK, now he's showing us he can do edgy.'

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.

Some musicians don't have strong opinions, or they deliberately don't have strong opinions because they want to try and sell as many records as possible.

A lot of artists think that to be current, you have to follow what's out there and do something that's so unlike what you normally do. It can work, but it doesn't if you chase it.

Being in somebody else's thing and saying their words and not having any right to change it - I don't know how I'd deal with that. I'd like to think I could do it, but I just know I've got a dead particular taste.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

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

It's very easy to fall into a rut where you're just making things that you don't believe in for other people.

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.