Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes

From the moment I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was accused by various people of selling out. So I feel I've done my sell-out films already. I've sold everything! I've sold every piece of soul I ever had!

Any band that is out there chasing it is doing more destruction to music then someone who is out there playing what they truly feel.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. Artists who work too hard to produce what consumers want are often accused of selling out. Thus, even the languages of capitalism and art conflict: a firm that has 'sold out' has succeeded, but an artist that has 'sold out' has failed.

The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it's a tightrope. It's a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.

As a creative individual, I really go out of my way to avoid the corporate scene in terms of songwriting. If the first question is how much money is it going to make, I'm going to be in trouble anyway.

I'm down to sell records but not my soul.

When money enters in - then, for a price, I become a liar - and a good one I can be whether with pencil or subtle lighting or viewpoint. I hate it all, but so do I support not only my family, but my own work.

It’s also true that I might have never made Taxi Driver [1976] were it not for the success of Alice [Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 1974]. The question of commercialism is a source of worry. Must one make a choice, must it be a matter of either setting your sights on winning an Academy Award and becoming a millionaire, or making only the movies you want to make and starving to death?

I hate that sense of entitlement or the sense of business crawling into playing music.

I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

There are so many intellectual and moral angels battling for rationalism, good citizenship, and pure spirituality; so many and such eminent ones, so very vocal and authoritative! The poor devil in man needs all the support and advocacy he can get. The artist is his natural champion. When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.

You've got to be in a place where you can put your guard down. I've got a long list of things I consider to be selling out. But amongst that list, one of them is when you make art without putting your guard down.

I feel like I've given up a lot of my fantasies. I just want to do things differently, and to a lot of people that's annoying. I like weird stuff. I always hoped if we had a big success it would be on our own terms.

I never get too many problems. You can never please everyone anyway, obviously. And some people take the easy route and just play the greatest hits, and their audience is happy to hear that as well, and that's fine, but it wouldn't please me. But it doesn't trouble me.

I don't really understand the concept of having a career, or what agents mean when they say they're building one for you. I just do things I think will be interesting and that have integrity. I hate those tacky, pointless, big, fluffy, unimportant movies.

Every time the industry gets powerful, and corporate thinking dominates what the music is, then the music really pales.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

Fortunately, I'm able to make a living from comics, so I'm privileged enough to be quite choosy, though most cartoonists can't afford to be. It's really an uncomfortable situation, since I'm not an illustrator, though I do get calls from morally indefensible businesses offering me money to decorate their ambitions. It's extremely rare, almost unheard of, in fact, that I am asked to do a comic strip. Do writers get calls to pen Toyota advertisements? Do composers get asked to write chamber pieces about exercise machines?

Our Exhibitions [The Royal Academy] have... a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

I could do Rust In Peace again, but I don't want to. I could have followed that formula but, God, why? I would have to have done so much heroin and cocaine - and I wasn't going to. Not if I'm paying for it!