Darin Strauss Quotes

A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.

It's hard when you put a year of good work into something and someone at the top says no, and they pull your show's title off a bulletin board and chuck it in the trash.

I never want to be in a position where I have to defend my material. It's too subjective. It's for other people to defend or not defend.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

I make films that are what they are. Some people like them, and some people don't.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

I will say that over the years I've been associated with things that were well-reviewed that I wasn't particularly crazy about, and I've been in things that didn't get very good reviews that I was rather fond of.

If I like it, it's gonna be on my album. You can't please everyone.

I sometimes think it's better to go with a bad movie that is true to a certain point of view than to take something and make people try to like it when they're not supposed to.

It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.

It's like these songs are your babies and you don't want anybody to think your babies are ugly! You never really know until you throw it out there if it's gonna take.

I think every director has a different take, some are good, some are bad. The directors you get on best with sometimes don't make the best films, so who's to say who is right.

First and foremost, you have to make the movie for yourself. And that's not to say, to hell with everyone else, but what else have you got to go on but your own taste and judgment?

I've made records that everyone has hated and I've loved, and made records that everyone has loved and I've deemed, at best, mediocre.

How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity.

I think you have to judge everything based on your personal taste. And if that means being critical, so be it. I hate political correctness. I absolutely loathe it.

Allow the artist to finish the piece of work before you critique it.

I still take work if I think it's good. If I like the script, I'll do it. If I don't, I won't.

When you make a film, you like to run it with an audience. They tell you you're narrow-minded or subjective, or that seems too long, or that doesn't work.

The thing is, I make music I like. So it's just weird if someone says they don't like it.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

In England, we have this saying about Marmite: people either love it or hate it. That's like a lot of the movie work I've done. People either find it repulsive or find it really interesting and get engaged in it.

I think it's pretty stupid to write off an entire genre of anything. It's one thing to say 'I don't like country music.' But it's pretty narrow minded to say 'All country music sucks.' Of course, that being said, all short-form improv sucks.

If they say they don't like the way I play Beethoven, then I can swallow that, and maybe they're right. But if they don't like what I've written, then it's about me.

While I hope that people like my work, I don't think an artist should be afraid of ­people not liking his work.