What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity.
You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.
All art is exploitation.
Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.
I have made it a rule for a long time, not to part with the copyright of my drawings, for I have been so copied, my drawings reproduced and sold for advertisements and done in ways I hate.
There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.
Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps ... they're either one or the other! ... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder! ... they stand condemned! ... the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!
Gauguin is creepy - let's just face it. He goes off into the Pacific, and he's looking at these young girls, and the colonial gaze: It's just really problematic.
I think in a lot of situations I had got songs stolen from me, or treated badly.
The big corporations and the big companies turned musicians into factory workers on an assembly line.
Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?
Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.
The industry is a menace to artists.
It's the meanest thing to abuse your power as a songwriter. To write pointedly about someone... it's kind of unfair to use them. They can't answer you or have a rebuttal.
I have been in situations where actors are treated like robots: say the lines, say it like this, we don't have time for conversations. That is a terrible position to be in as an artist. You feel used.
...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.
I discovered early on that some performers live their life in order to act, so all their relationships are simply an experience that they can feed back into their work. Which I find vampiric.
For now, I'm supposing that all movements are equal, which they're not, except in this respect: that none of them gives a damn about artists beyond their immediate utility. Good movements will use a writer just as ruthlessly as bad ones; since they all fancy they have better things to do than worry about one man's artistic survival.
All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.
Being a Negro writer these days is a racket and I'm going to make the most of it while it lasts. About twice a year I sell a story. It is acclaimed. I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro literary renaissance. Long may it flourish
rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.
We eat up artists like there's going to be a famine at the end.
A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.
If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.
