Nina Simone Quotes

Precious few are those who can live in the lap of luxury ... who can keep their moral, spiritual and financial equilibrium ... while balancing on the elevated tightrope of success. ... there is about one in a hundred who can dance to the tune of success without paying the piper named Compromise.

We really just try not to think about the scrutiny and the pressure. We're just trying to make the show that we like, and we're working really hard at it.

Eventually I got asked to be in a Michael J. Fox sitcom called High School U.S.A. I didn’t think it was funny and said no. They doubled the money, and that kind of offended me. I realized, oh, that’s right, my opinion means nothing in Hollywood. I’d seen other people compromise, and I felt that once you gave up on what you wanted to do, you couldn’t go back. It was selling out. So I decided to go back to Minneapolis.

My God! How terrible these money questions are for an artist!

Cheat your landlord if you can -- and must -- but do not try to shortchange the Muse.

Despite a lot of people thinking that everything gets more and more difficult, I always assumed that people are going to be "Oh, at last you buckled, you're trying to be commercial."

I think no matter what you do, a certain amount of people are going to call you a sellout, somehow, you know. If I ever start trying to make a living on it.

We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.

Sometimes I decide not to make something because I am proud and think I am better than that - and then I realise I have to pay the rent and I have to take something which is even worse than all the other stuff they offer you because you were being so proud not to take it! But you adjust and sometimes for one reason or another there is no strategy at the end but there is the ability to do the best that you can with what you have.

I don't know how to sell out. If I tried to sell out I don't think I could.

I think it's much more important to know the truth than it is to make money on it.

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises.... If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest, not what pays

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I want to try it again and again, and a lot of times my fellow musicians have to hold me back and say, "Nah, I think we got it."

I just try to be honest, because I think that's part of my job description as a writer.

I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too. Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

There's a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it's driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it's a tension that I think I feed off.

Everyone wants to be liked, so of course you want critical acclaim. After that, box office acclaim isn't bad. More than anything I think you have to try and make something you're proud of.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

A lot of people think I'm under a lot of pressure with my family and friends spending all that money to follow me around

There’s nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else’s. That’s a difficult statement to live up to, but then I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

I don't think I'm that much different from any other working actor that's trying to make a living.

Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema.

I think you first have to get into Kim Jong-un's head, you know, which is he's in a state of paranoia. He's incredibly concerned about anything and everything around him. I think these nuclear tests were a message to South Korea after the election. So what we're going to do is continue to tighten the screws. He feels it. He absolutely feels it. And we're going to continue, whether it's sanctions, whether it's press statements, anything that we have to do.

Certainly there's pressure while your making the movie.