Hiro Murai Quotes

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run.

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

I always felt in my band and in the pop-rock format that I wasn't weird enough, that I wasn't standing out enough. Wearing things to get people's attention - I didn't want to do any of that. I didn't want to compromise myself.

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

I was very pushed to look a certain way and act a certain way, and it wasn't me, but I played by their rules to get my foot in the door.

I wish I came from a more pure place. I don't have something to say from the bottom of my soul. I just know how to take stuff I like and repackage it in a slightly different way.

The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.

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

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

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

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

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

You know, there's so much imitation and so much pandering in Hollywood.

What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it.

I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I'm sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don't even know when you're being compromised till after the fact, and that's what you regret.

I can't think of anything worse, really, than to try to live up to someone else's expectations of what you should be. You don't make art by consensus.

You can inspire the world. Or you can be liked by all. You don't get to do both.

I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.

I think that's part of the battle of defining yourself as an artist. You're constantly fighting the pressure from outside to be pigeonholed and deliver more of what people already liked.

If you try to create something that everybody can relate to, you're gonna make something that nobody can relate to.

We've become accustomed to repurposing and living vicariously through other people's work instead of going out and making our own.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

You can filter certain stuff - it depends what artist you are - but you're never going to be true to yourself if you're worried about what other people think.

So many artists try to be something that they're not.