Popularity vs. Quality, Popularity vs Quality Quotes

Just because you sell lots of records it doesn't mean to say you're any good. Look at Phil Collins.

Lots of headless chickens running around - artists with 14 million followers on Twitter, some making millions, none making cultural impact.

I grew up in a renaissance period, a very lucky time when the greatest music ever made was also the most commercial. We'll never see that again, so for me, there's only one criteria, which is greatness. That's all I care about. Is what I'm doing reaching for greatness? Whether I achieve it or not, that is one hundred percent of my criteria.

If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.

I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.

If a show is a critical success but a ratings flop, I assume that people are just championing the show because it looks cool to root for an underdog.

I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

Popularity is not a gurantee of quality.

I think, and I don't know if it's because of 'Searching for Sugar Man,' but South Africans seem to not have to go with what's popular but what they like, and that's refreshing.

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.

Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.

I've avoided doing a network comedy, because I wouldn't get my own way. Even though it would get more viewers, it wouldn't be mine.

I think it's good to, especially when you start to get to achieve certain levels of success and start doing a lot of interviews and having a lot of reviews, it would be quite easy to get pretty full of yourself. I think it's an important thing to try and keep yourself in check and just be aware that popularity doesn't necessarily run in parallel to quality.

Television is a golden goose that lays scrambled eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. Anyway, more people like scrambled eggs than caviar.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

The fact that the theatregoing public likes my music is no credit to me. There are many other composers who write better music that the public doesn't like.

If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that's a sign that it's good - not that it's stale. And the opposite is true - if everyone wants to make your movie, that's a sign that it probably sucks.

The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist.

I don't judge cinema on its box-office success.

The corporations are shoving just the worst music down everybody's throats, and I think the result of that is that nobody has any taste. They have no bar as to what is good.

Who are these bloggers? They're not trained editors at Vogue magazine. There are bloggers writing recipes that aren't tested that aren't necessarily very good, or are copies of what really good editors have created and done. Bloggers create a kind of a popularity but they are not the experts. We have to understand that.

I do know one thing: I wish people were doing more dangerous musicals, more courageous musicals and not just falling into the trap of trying to figure out what the public wants, because you find out that the public very often wants what's good.