Kevin Abstract Quotes

The danger is that the artists who'll put grime into the commercial and public eye will put grime at the back of their closets and jump on another genre of music.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

When you snatch little pieces of other people's lives and try to palm them off as your own, that's more disgusting than anything. Robin Williams is a huge thief. Denis Leary is a huge thief. His whole stand-up career is based on Bill Hicks, a brilliant guy who died years ago.

I don't think it's so hard to be commercial and interesting. Look at Prince, or Neil Young.

If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than forced music. I mean, this world has enough of that right now, where it's basically McDonald's making music. 'Everybody needs another hamburger and fries.' Here's a piece of crap that nobody's gonna care about it two years.

I mean they're making remakes of my films and I'm not even dead yet! Why would you want to make a remake?

Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.

Before, you only had one Public Enemy and one Rakim and one Salt 'N' Pepa. Now, people have got the formula, and some of them are just doing it for the cheque. It's kind of watered down.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

I'd love more production houses to encourage artists to create what they want and not just churn things out.

New York's various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students.

I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.

With country, it's hard to penetrate the thick layers of commercialism that have been applied like shellac coatings over the real thing.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.

The only art I'll ever study is stuff I can steal from.

Artists, by definition innocent, don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times...and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire.

We had a missionary zeal about blues music, and I felt, particularly, that Mickie Most was attempting to homogenize, sweeten, and make it accessible for the mass market. Which is understandable if you're the producer, but aggravating if you're the artist.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

I tended not to be concerned about whether a song was going to be a hit when I wrote it. Because it became evident that none of us knew what was a hit and what wasn't. So I thought if I just write what I like, why shouldn't people like what I like?