Mary Oliver Quotes

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

Any cartoon that can be liked by a committee is really not worth drawing; in fact, must not be drawn at all! Better to become a stockbroker.

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.

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run.

I'd much rather fail than do something like 'The Chorus Line' movie, sanitized and Hollywoodized.

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

If you want to capitulate to what commercial needs are, you can always be commercially valuable, but I'm not interested in being that.

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

When I'm writing for other people, I have to play it safe.

I think that's part of the battle of defining yourself as an artist. You're constantly fighting the pressure from outside to be pigeonholed and deliver more of what people already liked.

The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it's a tightrope. It's a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.

I can't be interesting, controversial, and the writer I'd like to be if I need everybody to like me and think I'm doing the right thing, because those two things, in my experience, never go hand in hand.

I may as well do everything as if it’s brand new, and if I start to feel that any of it’s a compromise, then I’ll...I’ll be in Wisconsin.

The only real failure is trying to second-guess the taste of an audience. Nothing comes out of that except a kind of inward humiliation.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

Most films I work on, the people making the film are constantly second-guessing the executives of the studio, the producer, and the audience. It is very hard to accomplish anything in that situation.

From the moment I went to Hollywood for the first time, I was accused by various people of selling out. So I feel I've done my sell-out films already. I've sold everything! I've sold every piece of soul I ever had!

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

In the world of creativity, laziness translates into an inability to be rigorous enough to create fearlessly. It makes us plagiarise or water our creativity down to make it more acceptable to the public.

If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all.

I don't say that I'm going to be like every other comic that's blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don't do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them.

Writers are always selling somebody out.