Gilbert Hernandez Quotes

While I'm here, I'm gonna milk it for all I can, so when I'm no longer hot - and I know that day is coming - I will step over here and enjoy everything I've created up to this point. The music is just opening all these doors, so I can relax.

I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.

I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.

So it's hard to be an artist and be true to the reality of the world you want to create and also make it entertaining and successful financially.

I'm confident in my intentions and why I'm making music. I'm not making music because I want to be on your TV screen or the cover of your magazine.

But as long as you're creating the art you want to create, if people start liking you, you shouldn't have to apologize. You want your stuff to be heard by as many people as possible.

The sincerity of the art worker must permeate the song as naturally as the green leaves break through the dead branches in springtime.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

I mean, why am I considered an 'it girl?' Because I'm in a lot of movies right now or am on the covers of magazines? I just hope there is something solid behind that. Because here's the thing with 'it girl' status. It's great and amazing that anybody is saying that at all. But how long does that last?

This business switching styles can't be done honestly by one man. As soon as he can play his instrument well, he can express himself, and all his life he has only one self.

There are artists or filmmakers or cinematographers who have had long careers who, maybe to reinvent themselves or just to stay in a secure place, layer it on or ham it up, if I can use that expression, or make grand choices that don't feel as authentic as what they did to make us fall in love with them in the first place.

I'm not doing anything intentionally to stay in the public eye. I'm staying true to my art, like I always have. The press, for whatever reason, decided to zone in on what is very common banter for me. It got worked out through song - the same way I work everything out.

'Certifiably Jonathan' contrives crises for its subject - a bid to get his paintings into MOMA, among others.

I knew so many people were coming up to me because they knew who I was, not because they were fans of my music. That bothered me because I don't want to be a celebrity; I want to be an artist.

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

Because obviously when we write our music, we pour our heart and soul into it. I put everything into my music... I just feel like, I want people to actually hear what I have to say.

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.

O painter, take care lest the greed for gain prove a stronger incentive than renown in art, for to gain this renown is a far greater thing than is the renown of riches.

The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.

Every now and then I'll get seduced by the idea of money, and I'll take a stab at that...and I fall flat on my ass. I've never written a lasting song with that mindset. It doesn't work.

I'd be very suspicious of anybody that seems to have to move to the next level of expression. I distrust that: now I'm writing a book, now I'm being an actor. It should be a natural thing. I think it's a natural thing for you to act. But I think that people that feel that, because they've written one maybe quite beautiful love song that equips them to play Romeo, is probably misguided.

If you want to be an artist, truly try to write what you believe, and if you write when you don't believe then you should try to become an actor.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!

I’m not all about money, but, like most musicians, I am about survival.

It is not art in the professionalized sense about which I care, but that which is created sacredly, as a result of a deep inner experience, with all of oneself, and that becomes 'art' in time.