Dorothy Parker Quotes

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

In the world of creativity, laziness translates into an inability to be rigorous enough to create fearlessly. It makes us plagiarise or water our creativity down to make it more acceptable to the public.

The job of the artist is to go to the places where most other people are embarrassed to go to. And show it.

Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you.

Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.

I never get too many problems. You can never please everyone anyway, obviously. And some people take the easy route and just play the greatest hits, and their audience is happy to hear that as well, and that's fine, but it wouldn't please me. But it doesn't trouble me.

Every time the industry gets powerful, and corporate thinking dominates what the music is, then the music really pales.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist.

Fortunately, I'm able to make a living from comics, so I'm privileged enough to be quite choosy, though most cartoonists can't afford to be. It's really an uncomfortable situation, since I'm not an illustrator, though I do get calls from morally indefensible businesses offering me money to decorate their ambitions. It's extremely rare, almost unheard of, in fact, that I am asked to do a comic strip. Do writers get calls to pen Toyota advertisements? Do composers get asked to write chamber pieces about exercise machines?

Our Exhibitions [The Royal Academy] have... a mischievous tendency, by seducing the Painter to an ambition of pleasing indiscriminately the mixed multitude of people who resort to them.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

It’s also true that I might have never made Taxi Driver [1976] were it not for the success of Alice [Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 1974]. The question of commercialism is a source of worry. Must one make a choice, must it be a matter of either setting your sights on winning an Academy Award and becoming a millionaire, or making only the movies you want to make and starving to death?

The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?

I could do Rust In Peace again, but I don't want to. I could have followed that formula but, God, why? I would have to have done so much heroin and cocaine - and I wasn't going to. Not if I'm paying for it!

In order to create art today, you have to compromise your art somewhat and be a businessman.

it's difficult in Hollywood to be allowed to try anything. It's all a terrible compromise. There is no time for art. All that matters is what they call box office.

I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.

The most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and allow every one to erase the passage which pleases him the least.

Why should I hold back now and sound mediocre, just so I can sound mediocre twenty years from now?

It may or may not sound pretentious. But I've turned down, consciously and specifically, many jobs I knew would have been a pretty surefire way to go about making a lot of money, being recognized and gaining power in the industry.

I learned how difficult it is to be an artist. There are always compromises. The record company wants you to do this, your fans want you to do this, your family, you can't concentrate on your work. It's a hard thing to be an artist and not give up. That's why I have so much respect for people like Dylan and Neil Young and Tom Waits, because they keep at it. I have a new respect for a true artist.

Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.