Iggy Pop Quotes

If you go to Hollywood, you've already sold out.

I've always been noted for being original and doing different thing. So for me to hop on the train that's going on would be - shoot, if I wanted to hop on the train, I might as well have hopped on gangsta rap back when it was popular and tried to do that.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

At the end of the day, you want to be always the one that's one step ahead of everybody, and when it comes to hip-hop, culture and art, you want to be that signature guy.

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.

I don't want to get myself in trouble - and I don't think I'm super important or anything - but I think it's so funny that when you look at the business and the way that people make decisions in their lives, whether they're in art or music or they're in industry, they forget that being unique is the answer.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

'S.N.L.' has become what it was always trying to make fun of. It's become this big machine. I don't want to be plugged into a machine.

My goal is not to make popular things. My goal is to make the things I love as popular as I can make them.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

I really don't believe in the word 'selling out.'

Rock and roll has become entertainment that just says what the consumer wants to hear. There's no more edge or rebellion that sets it apart from the norm.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

The only enemy of art is taste.

We are the ORIGIN of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, ORIGINALITY is the process of remaining true to ourselves.

If you're always thinking about someone else's work, about the tradition you're working in, how can you possibly make anything good?

I think if you try to tailor your act to anybody, you end up with an act that doesn't work anyway.

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.

I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture. It's a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish. Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

You want people to hate you. If you're just making people happy, you're like Mumford & Sons.

We've all forgotten how to be original.

You know, there's so much imitation and so much pandering in Hollywood.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.