Russ Quotes

As an artist, you don't stop making art because people are not buying it.

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

I've always had a fascination with making your own music but never have been skilled enough to play the instrument, so to be able to make music without the ability was awesome.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

I'm just going to go out there, and if people want to put me on the front of their magazine or whatever, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine as well. I'm just going to go out there and make my music.

I think the most important thing for an artist is to not worry about what anybody else thinks. You just have to do what comes from your heart and your being and put it out there-that's true in any of the arts.

I just sing the stuff that makes me smile, makes me feel like I didn't sell myself out.

I left because I could no longer make records that sounded less and less like me. I tried to please people instead of believing in my own strength, until the only thing I could do was walk away.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.

I don't think you can spend too much time as an artist believing what other people think.

I just write songs from the heart, and you never know who'll like the songs. I try to make sure that I don't allow anybody's expectation to weigh on me. I have my own expectation of life. I believe in letting people be free.

I'm just gonna write a record for my kid, and if people hate it, it doesn't matter.

I'm someone who speaks my mind, so it was important to me that my publisher value originality and creative expression.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

Artists make art for themselves. Art is an honest expression. Artists who pander to their fans by trying to make music "for" their fans make empty, transparent art. The true fan does not want you to make music for them, they want you to make music for you, because that's the whole reason they fell in love with you in the first place.

I've never written one note or word of music simply because I think it will make money.

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

The true artists is one who insists on producing a supply, whether or not there's any demand.

I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author-detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota, without . . . having painted as much as you can cover with your hand, to please somebody or in order to sell the picture more easily.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.