Janet Frame Quotes

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

I would never tell someone else how to use their platform, because I think I'm much more comfortable allowing the work that I do to speak for itself.

I don't want people to just hand me music and be like, 'Here, you sound good on this. Sing it.' I want to be able to say, 'This is me.'

Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.

I'm certainly not who people think I am. I always do whatever I want to do, and my films are personal to me.

My job is to just express something that I want to express. And if I'm ahead or behind the curve, that's for others to decide.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

I don't like people telling me what to do, or trying to MAKE me write songs.

I used to get in trouble with my old agent, because I've never been driven by fear or need or greed. I want my work to represent me as a person, so I can be quite fussy.

I've never been one to sit back and go, 'I'd better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don't want to lose them.'

They say I'm insane because I need to have so much creative control. They say I'm unmanageable, but I'm not. I just know what I like. I'm obsessed with it. If you can't control it, that's like having somebody else paint your pictures. How could you do that? I never could.

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.

I'm not a super-actorly actor, my-body-is-an-instrument type of person, but I do want to do fun, exciting, interesting things. I have a 2001 PT Cruiser. I saved my money so I can take my time and choose something that I think is great, and that's what I'm waiting for.

It was important that I got my own voice out there in the world. I'd used it on other people's films, collaborated, and I thought, 'You know, I can do this myself.' That was more important than anything else.

I know I'm not gonna please everybody when I make a record. I don't let that affect any of my decisions.

I've had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making. Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn't allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

I have this original style that I want to show to the world. I don't want to be kind of this beat down, bruise-you-up kind of dude and have Karl Anderson cut all my promos for me. I don't want to have to do that.

I couldn't be an artist who was told what to do, what to be, what to sing.

Can't nobody make you make any music that you don't wanna make. Remember that.

My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.

Metallica lives in a little bubble. We just do our own thing. We're not part of any trends or waves or fads. We can just do our own thing, all the time. It's a great luxury. I don't think we were really appreciative of it until recently, and really understood that it is what keeps us alive. It's great to be able to have the freedom to run around and do all this crazy stuff, and at all cost, avoid making another record, just to piss our managers off.

An authentic life does not require anyone else's approval for your creative choices.

The one thing I will never do is become pigeonholed.

You can't write something to please someone.

I'm my own artist, and I see artists as movies. No one should try to change them for anything. If you don't like it, you just don't follow it. And if you don't like a movie you don't watch it. Watch another movie.