William Friedkin Quotes

Mainly, I don't like it when music is made solely to impress people or in order to please business people; it doesn't sound good to me. If you're making music in order to become famous or loved by the masses... that's not what I'm about. When somebody's making music for the wrong reasons, I hear it right away.

If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.

If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process.

I think that as long as you stay true to you when you're putting out music, somebody's going to like it.

I play a certain style. I'm not willing to compromise that part of me.

If I can't be honest with music, forget it.

People get sucked into being so show-bizy. I mean this is show biz, but I just can't do anything that's not in my DNA.

Style is like voice, it grows organically from the truth of one's own life experience. Not in terms of chapters, per se, but in terms of stories. It is the story itself that creates an inherent structure.

It's about me doing me, about me being organic. I can't wear things and put on a front and say I like something when I don't. I won't wear something I wouldn't normally wear just for people to like it or for people to look at me like this or that in fashion.

I'm not a character, so how I rap is just an everyday thing.

I don't think I can create anything of lasting value unless it comes from the heart.

Most artists I know consider themselves to be phonies, along with the feeling that there's something that you're doing is essential, essential to communicate, and deeply, deeply real.

Thinking should be done before and after, not during photographing. Success depends on the extent of one's general culture. one's set of values, one's clarity of mind one's vivacity. The thing to be feared most is the artificially contrived, the contrary to life.

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artist to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn.

It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I've never bought into - with any artist. It's just not a real thing.

You have to be able to give the people what you want in your way. And that's how you, to me, become a person that they love and not just a fly-by night actor.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.

I did everything I could to not bring in any of the - any of the technical things I got from classical into jazz. And I did everything to really base it on my speaking voice and to just not try to make it sound pretty.

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself - whoever himself may be - is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.

To express truth is to write naturally, forcibly, and delicately.

The music that I make is pretty sincere; it's from my heart and I love it, and what just happened is more people have started to connect with my heart, and I haven't followed some kind of marketing scheme.

I wanted individuals who were clearly themselves and I just got to put some clothes on them, but they basically came "done," you know? How they feel comfortable. I just wanted them to walk down the streets of New York and I said, "You know what? Don't even pose, just walk and we'll take pictures."