Melvin Van Peebles Quotes

I'd much rather fail than do something like 'The Chorus Line' movie, sanitized and Hollywoodized.

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

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.

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

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

Becoming a commercial scene? I don't think people in grime would be happy about that.

The song 'Bite the Thong' in particular, with Damon Albarn, really encapsulates the whole dilemma of, 'Hmm, should I stay on the underground when everybody else is selling out?' Nowadays, you can just do it - have your name-brand clothes, do songs with rock n' rollers - and it's not considered selling out.

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

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

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

Selling out isn't selling out anymore. It's getting the brass ring.

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

Books are not brands. Some people are very willing to see themselves as a brand, but you can't be a certain type of writer to a certain type of person all the time. It will kill you.

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

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.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

People have always asked me, 'Haven't you wanted to sell out?', and it's like, who am I going to sell to?

I absolutely loathe the idea of doing a fragrance simply as a moneymaker. Personal brand to make money? Vomit.

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.

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

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.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

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