John Trudell Quotes

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

It does not in the least concern me whether I shall have at the end of my life thirty people who understand or three hundred. I am like an artist who paints a picture because he must, otherwise he is unhappy - not unhappy, but he must obey that creative impulse.

I never thought in terms of a "breakthrough" film. I wasn't looking for fame or a career path into Hollywood. I was doing it for myself. I just wanted to make a film that I really loved. If other people liked it, great. But you can never guess what other people are going to like.

What you write should entertain you and serve you first. Don't worry about maintaining anything beyond your own attention. Focus on exorcising your demons in the work. If you can do that, then you'll succeed in the world.

I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn't say otherwise.

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

I'm not looking to be an artist to make money. I'm looking to be an artist.

I have always tried to work according to what affects me, to a script that I like because it touches me in some way, without deliberately pursuing a commercial career or a particular image.

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.

If you're an artist, it's OK to put your money into your art. The advantage, in hindsight, is that you become the film, and the film becomes you; you breathe it.

Rather than trying to create an audience, just try and create music that feels good to you.

I don't make films to win prizes. I make films to make films.

My goal has always been to just be a person who makes great art.

I make music not to make money but because it's in me.

I think that for every artist, it's very important to have an output and to feel very strongly about the music you're producing.

There's nothing that compares with the time spent all by myself on a creation that is all my own. I still think of my solo work as my 'home planet' in comics, though I've learned to listen much more to editors and trusted friends for feedback.

You have to put time into the art to do it, and you have to know that what you'll get out of it is not a financial or a fame thing. It'll just be the pleasure of being an artist. And I'm cool with that.

I've always been the person who has needed a creative outlet.

Really I've just gotta be making really great music that I love and not worrying too much about what other people are gonna think about it.

Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale - who writes always to the unknown friend.

It took me a long time to get to a position where I can feel that, with my art, I'm capable of saying what I need to say, and once I finish it, I can sit back and say, "It's done, and I'm okay with that. People can judge it good or bad, and it doesn't matter. I'm okay with it because I said something I needed to say." That's a really hard place to get, as an artist.

We don't play to be seen. I'm addicted to music, not audiences.