Joss Whedon Quotes

I've found that if you just try to make the film you want, you'll find the right audience. If you try to please everyone, you're going to make really boring films.

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

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

No matter how hard I tried to popularize, I never cheapened a great work of art.

When I write a book... it's the same essential approach to music as with books. It has to be something I want to hear or read. Hopefully the audience comes along, since that's the only way you can write righteously. I have to ask, 'What do I want to hear?' not 'What do people want to hear?'

Trying to guess what the (mass) audience wants and then trying to satisfy that is usually a bad recipe for getting something good.

Art has never been a popularity contest.

I feel that if you made your writing too contrived to meet the market, it wouldn't be any good.

To bring a large audience to a piece of serious music and make it accessible does not mean reducing it in any way. And I've learned that if something is good, even if it is a little difficult, people will get that it is good.

You can't expect to connect with everybody, and that's all right. The more I make films, I'm learning that you don't have to make films for everybody. A film can be made for a smaller group of people than that, and it still warrants an existence.

A lot of the conceptualists and the prestige galleries are debasing themselves in presentations which have little else to them but the presentation.

When I sit down and make videos, my No. 1 thought is that I want to make a video that I want to watch.

Just because good films don't work does not mean we should stop making them.

I wouldn't disrespect myself or my art with any imitations.

They[ Lana and Andy Wachowski]are true artists. They really are trying to say something and trying to create something original, and there aren't that many people who do that.

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.

I don't want every fan; I'm interested in fans interested in quality work, authentic archetype depictions.

I work really hard on the shows and I think the shows speak for themselves. I don't want to construct the show to prove something.

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 make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don't, I pay a big price. But I can't make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.

I didn't want to do the whole, get the hottest person thing. I wanted to make sure every record felt right.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

A film can be big or small - I have to just fall in love with it. To connect with the character, the script, and the director. Sometimes they say to you, 'You should do that for your career; it's a big thing, people will go and see it,' but I wouldn't be able to, because my heart wouldn't be in it. I would drive people quite mad.