Curtis Jackson Quotes

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.

You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn't pay the bills.

I'll admit, sometimes I've paid the bills with acting. You know the phrase, 'It's one for the money, two for the showreel.' I don't want that as a director. I don't want to compromise myself. There's a big old wide world out there. I want to explore it.

I'm in a very good place to make records. Needing to make money off music is very dangerous.

Any cartoon that can be liked by a committee is really not worth drawing; in fact, must not be drawn at all! Better to become a stockbroker.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

It's a hard line to walk, man. Cause you know you want to make this movie, you want to make it dark and real, you want to show all this stuff but unfortunately you can't always do that.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

I think more money can be very detrimental to movies and TV because things get solved economically rather than creatively, and that's never a good solution.

Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

As an artist, you want to make good stories and create good art; as a businessman, you want to make money and make sure the investors are happy. The two will always clash, unfortunately.

The trick of making movies in this culture is how to not give up everything that makes them worthwhile in order to get them made - and that's a tricky balance.

I'm really careful with what the music gets put with, and we say no to so much stuff, loads of it, for things that might quadruple the sales of my album. But if it doesn't fit then it doesn't fit, you know?

They say, 'We will give you money, but we want you to play this or that.' And I always thought, 'If I'm going to do that, I might as well go back and be a dishwasher.'

I am all for high art but I owe it to myself to be clever about it and do commercial things too.

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

When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.

I'm very fussy about how my records sound, but I'm very aware that because of the way they sound, I will never be a big-selling, mainstream artist because the public has gotten conditioned to hearing pop music in a certain way. And I don't do it that way.

Being on a K-pop label and agency, everything's taken care of for you. The music is set up for you. Your food, manager, practice room, recording studios - all these things are in the palm of your hand. However, you know the compromise of what you can actually do or say.

And it's possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression - at least, not in the beginning - and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.

Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you.

There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.