Jim Goad Quotes

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

I do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.

It's kind of liberating to be able to bring your own ideas to things, but it's also a lot of pressure, it's like screenwriting on your feet.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

I don't consciously try to take my readers on a journey as I don't really think about my readers when I'm writing. I just try to write what I feel passionately about, to tell a story down onto the page.

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

I don't like to work in an office. I like to work in my house, to be among my own thoughts. The idea is for an editor to let his artist alone, let them be themselves, let them exchange their own ideas and you'll come up with something salable.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.

If there's an idea I think is really good and I feel like I can write it, then I'll do it.

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

The artist must yield himself to his own inspiraton, and if he has a true talent, no one knows and feels better than he what suits him.

It's very important that you never depend on money to fulfill your creative vision. If you do that, you're doomed to fail.

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it’s almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.

Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy.

I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.

I'm really open to just about anything but I think the real dream is to be able to write my own thing.

I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

In the first two years of my career, there were a lot of restraints on what I could do. I couldn't wear certain colors of lipstick, like bright pink, dark pink or red; [my lips] had to be natural. Eventually, I stopped communicating with certain people at the label, and did exactly what I wanted to do. And that was to cut my hair, dye it black, change my clothes, change my sound. Really to just express myself.

Poems aren't postcards to send home.

I like the idea of challenging Hollywood on its own turf. It's important to do that.

Don't try to outguess what's going on in publishing, and write what you want to write.

I'm very grateful to be in a position now where I have a lot more control to tell the stories I want to tell. I feel no obligation to tell any one story. I will tell you my interest mostly lies in telling stories about empowered women, but I don't feel it's an obligation. But I do feel like I am servicing a voice.