Tao Lin Quotes

I never looked at people or singing as commodities.

I'm confident in my intentions and why I'm making music. I'm not making music because I want to be on your TV screen or the cover of your magazine.

It's not in the interest of the artist to think of his market.

Not everything in the United States is for sale.

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

It's much nicer to be praised than to be damned. But you have to have a certain sense of your own priorities and ideas about what works and what doesn't because otherwise, if you're just looking for eternal validation all the time, you can be motivated by the wrong things and I don't think it's as personally satisfying in your own work.

I think it's harder to make a classic now, not because of what people say, but because artists now are so concerned with what people say.

The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art.

I think the biggest thing that people fear when it comes to art becoming a business is those authentic, pure aspirations of art being compromised.

If it's just politics that's running music, f - k that. I'm out of here! I can't think of anything more boring.

Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that’s a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.

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

You know when I think about what I'm doing - what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.

I don't have to worry about what people are thinking and what's going on in the industry. I don't want that stuff to influence what I'm doing. Because I think it stifles you creatively. I don't want to have to care too much about that. All I care about is what the fans think. It's really all I care about, honestly.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

You cannot create a piece of art merely for money. Doing it as part of commerce so denudes art of wonder that it ceases to be art.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

I never pigeonholed myself - the only reason you'd want to pigeonhole is to monetize your business and, as a person, I don't see the importance of doing that. My music took off above the rest of those things: You can just make a song, put it on a CD, and get it out to all these people.

The world thinks that music is a commercial commodity. I'm glad that is not my code.

If you start acting and you start thinking about and worrying about what other people are going to say about it, you'll never really fully commit to who it is and what it is that you're playing.

I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.

Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.

If I don't have to think about the commercial aspect of it, then I feel like I'm going to make better films.

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.