Budd Schulberg Quotes

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

What makes you the establishment is if you buy into it.

I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I've wired myself for failure.

Negativity sells. I have been labelled a rebel. If I had been one, would I have got married at 23? Would I have been a straight A student?

Now, in music, it seems more like the popular crowd suppresses anyone who is different.

It's like, you can't have any fun, and if you do have fun, if you do your own thing, you're considered crazy and should be in a mental institution. Now, that's what I find creepy. I'm eccentric. I am not messed up.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

People are stupid. There's a lot of dumb stuff that's successful.

When I was a kid, the avant-garde to me was boring because it was just the flip side of being really successful.

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

I have always been mainstream. It's so weird, because I don't see it as something negative at all. So many people see it as something negative.

The only behaviour that is truly common is to avoid doing something because you think others might consider it common.

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

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally.

Society loves to put bubbles up there and pop them, and I resent it. I'd rather expose myself myself.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

Woe to him inside a non-conformist clique who does not conform to non-conformity.

A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public.

I like that idea that what I do might be mainstream. Might be.

If you are the kind of person who listens to conservative advice, you may do okay in life, but you probably won't ever be a fantastic leader. You have to take risks, and you also have to go against conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom doesn't make for startling advances in society.

It's very conventional to say that you're a contrarian these days.