Anthony Hopkins Quotes

People want to make a distinction between what's commercial and what's art.

A lot of dumb pictures have made a lot of money, but that doesn't mean they're going to be anything cinema students will revel over in the future.

The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist.

I personally don't distinguish between artistic and commercial films.

What makes a classic is difficult to define. It's entirely subjective, of course. And the term is employed far too promiscuously.

I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

One of my gripes about movies is that people take them so seriously, and the moneymaking aspects are so brutal.

Art isn't held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you're a loser if you're making music until you prove otherwise.

It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.

But, you see, the theatre is not always art in America.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.

The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

If you make a good film, then there's no harm if it achieves commercial success.

Some people think big audiences are crass and that, say, a comedy that appeals to a wide audience is pandering. Other people would argue that you could say that about Moliere.

Good music will always be recognized in the end.

I'm not interested in artistic records for the sake of making artistic records where they're so cool no one listens to them.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

Art should never try to be popular.