Carlisle Floyd Quotes

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Forget about musical credibility. I think, unless you're Radiohead or whatever, it's pointless striving for that. What I would like is some respect.

I didn't become a commercially successful artist by design, and actually I think that commercially successful just means, if you analyse it, that a lot of people like you. It's become a dirty word, and I don't necessarily think it needs to be.

A film has to be for commercial success as well as earn you respect as an artist. You don't want to do only things that are designed to run commercially, and neither do you want to do things that get acclaim but don't run.

You don't want a movie to have a lot of awards and no audience.

The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist.

Despite whatever commercial kind of success you might have or radio success, I don't want to do something just to get as many people as possible to listen.

What you want is the thing that critics love and audiences love, but that's the hardest thing to do.

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

If any of our songs ever did make it on the top ten, I'd disband the group immediately.

Even though some of the films I've made haven't been particularly commercial, I don't find them failures.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.

There are two kinds of success. One is musical or artistic and the other is commercial.

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

It's a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you're doing, it's therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have 'sold out.' Just so you know, if you're doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.

I don't want to be 'box-office girl,' but I don't want to be 'that indie girl' either.

Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel, and I want to be successful and reach a big audience. I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world; I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another.

You make movies for the people. If critics happen to like them too, well, that's a home run.

If the only people we seek to impress are within our own ivory towers of artistic excellence or our hallowed institutions, we will find the audience is gone in 20 to 30 years. I find as I keep a broader audience in mind, I choose to sing and say more things I actually want to share and fewer things just for the sake of impressing others.

Art has never been a popularity contest.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

The concept of commercialism in the fashion and art world is looked down upon. You know, just to think, 'What amount of creativity does it take to make something that masses of people like?' And, 'How does creativity apply across the board?'

I never, in anything I've ever done, tried to get you to like it. I was never going to succeed at that. That's not the way most entertainment is made. Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.

I don't think you're selling out by allowing the masses to love your art. The only curse is that, when you get so big, sometimes people forget to look at the music.