Lupe Fiasco Quotes

When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art.

I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.

It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and says, 'This is just a mess', the word 'just' is not so good, but 'mess' might be right. Why not a mess? If it makes you say, 'Wow, I've never seen anything like that', that's beautiful.

Many musicians will say they don't care about the money yet they must commit themselves to appear at given times and places, and to produce what sells, whether they believe in it or not. It depends on contracts.

I'd love more production houses to encourage artists to create what they want and not just churn things out.

There will always be some films that the audience would like and some that they don't. But if I start becoming a slave to appreciation, I will be subjecting myself and my talent to one particular type of taste. I don't want to do that.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

Having been subjected to the pigeonholing of Hollywood myself, I realized that once you become a studio-approved director, your chances of ever making your own film again are zero. You make the films that the studio wants you to make.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

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.

Through art, you create your own world.

I want to make music that I like; not something that I have to make because I think it's going to sell.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

You have kids studying master class visual arts who are pushed to make films that will be successful economically; that's what they focus on. So they work for corporate interest instead of artistic expression.

The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.

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

The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist.

The biggest danger of Hollywood becoming a purely corporate town resides in the creative process.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

I never do anything to strictly satisfy a fickle, ever-changing commercial world. I do the music I like to play. It's the only way I feel comfortable existing in the industry.

Any cartoon that can be liked by a committee is really not worth drawing; in fact, must not be drawn at all! Better to become a stockbroker.

It's hard enough to make a good song and a good recording of that song. But to try to tailor it to some outside force is just like - It's never been a factor in what I've done or what the band's done.

I produce the records. I don't hand over control to some really expensive producer who then talks to the record company and then tries to bend me to their will - for commercial purposes.