James Thurber Quotes

You can't be trying to make a film that pleases all people, you know, so it's not a concern of mine.

All the arts, to varying degrees, involve some kind of a compromise. This being so, how far need the radio dramatist go to meet the public without losing sight of himself and his own standards of value?

I never set out to make a movie that was everything to everybody; if that were the case, we could all just take a picture of a tree and agree that the tree is beautiful and move on with our lives. I wouldn't even need to show up.

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.

It's good to please the network, but you really just have to tell the stories you want to tell, and if you try to please other people, it ends up starting to water stuff down. Those decisions we have to make are hard, but we usually just err on the side of 'What would we want to see?'

Everybody wants to write a hit song, but in Nashville people want to write the best song, which was my original intention as a singer/songwriter. ... I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

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 important to make art that you intended to make. If it gets compromised later, that's not a good thing.

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

The critics are not writers - they're not a part of the creative process; therefore, they should not influence how I go about doing my next bit of work.

I've talked about this a lot, but 'The Witch' took four years to finance because there were certain compromises I wouldn't make.

People are not able to just make music anymore; we have to do things that don't necessarily make the art any better. But that's just how it is.

I will do films I want to make. I will never make a film for commerce.

Commercial theater, in its agenda to appeal to everybody, is often at the expense of the unique vision of the artist.

If you start adapting to audiences, you're really second-guessing the situation, and it becomes a bit more like cabaret.

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

The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it's a tightrope. It's a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.

We may not be proud of every song we've ever done - or been forced to do - but I believe we've done more than meets the eye.

When directors tell me they want a song like one, I tell them no song should be like another. I don't listen to directors.

When it comes to art, you just need to be focused on doing a great thing. Not thinking all about the business.

Solo, you don't have compromise. It gets back to what's great when you're a musician.

As a creative individual, I really go out of my way to avoid the corporate scene in terms of songwriting. If the first question is how much money is it going to make, I'm going to be in trouble anyway.

Rahman is very very director friendly. He is ever ready to go whichever the director wants, the story wants, depending on the kind of movie or the music you want, and within that he finds his niche. It is a constantly complementary process. At the end of the day he is not pleasing you, he has to please himself.

There's a difference between making the music for a check vs. what you think you should be doing artistically and creatively.