Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes

Hollywood is the kind of place that takes what you do well in one thing and manufactures it so the joy can be taken out of it.

The dichotomy between art and industry is totally dysfunctional in terms of film.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

I've never worried about how a new release will be received. I simply try to do the best I can and leave the rest to the gods. The music industry in those terms is something I loathe and detest. It conjures up images of a gigantic factory spewing out parts of the machine.

Kmart uses such mass production that they are able to lower their prices. My hose, for instance, is made by the same factory, the same machines, the same threads as the hose made by four top designers.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

Hip-hop don't have no fresh energy, none at all. It's money driven, everybody tryin' to make that cheque, nobody putting art in their albums any more.

If audiences are sort of interested in movies that are made like McDonald's hamburgers, which do have a value in the world, then we have to re-evaluate our entire career.

My whole life I've played music for my own personal enjoyment and the idea of it becoming a machine or a business is just horrible.

The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators.

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.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

With Lady Antebellum, there's always pressure. It's hard for commerce not to rear its ugly head when you're making decisions.

By 1917, thanks to the new munitions factories and the women that worked in them, the British Empire was supplying more than 50 million shells a year.

I think the biggest thing that people fear when it comes to art becoming a business is those authentic, pure aspirations of art being compromised.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

I'm always concerned about marketing or commercial philosophies. I can't feel good about having my name on a bottle of perfume that comes from a factory making perfume with all the same ingredients as every other perfume. I can't feel good about a factory overseas polluting the air for something with my name on it. I'm okay with music - because it's digital or a CD. My music is my emotion in a bottle. But how is a perfume supposed to reflect me? How is a sweatshirt supposed to represent me?

The more business gets involved, the less fun it is.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

I've seen an awful lot of plays that I'd read before they were put into production and been shocked by what's happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window.

A great factory with the machinery all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse, and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world knows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the action of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.