Milos Forman Quotes

I feel lucky that I've been able to make a living from painting any idea that comes into my head.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

I work so I don't need to make rent through my songs, and I think if more people engaged with music without needing it to provide for their welfare, you're not beholden to anyone.

As long as I can make lots of money in other businesses, I'll continue to subsidize my own work.

The only way you can continue to make artistic films is to make an occasional one of those. They kind of keep your marketability going to the extent that people will employ you.

My ambition is we want artists to be able to afford to create the music they want to create, and if it takes them five years to sit down and make the album they want to make, they should be able to afford that. That's my goal.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

I'm just doing all type of music that I like. I'm not so worried about the money like I used to be. I got money now. I don't have to worry about that.

I decided that the whole idea of what it means to be an artist was that somehow you are ontologically oriented toward poverty : "As an artist, you don't make money." I had to figure out some kind of way to guarantee that I'd be able to continue doing the work that I wanted to do, whether I made money from the work I was doing or not.

In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn't have to write for my living.

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.

Boy, we'll get Raymond out and we won't go hungry anymore.

My big goal in life was always to figure out how I can make a lot of money so I can go off and make films irrespective of the opinion of the three or four critics who seem to rule the roost.

I knew I'd have to go to work in real estate or something else or I could never finish my novel.

I come from a really poor family, and when I started doing campaigns, it changed everything for my family. I am not complaining; I had a beautiful childhood - we didn't have a lot of money, but there was always food on the table, and my parents saved money so that in the holidays we would all get in the car and drive to the mountains.

I'm at a point where I don't have to wait for the income from the record to survive, so I'm in a comfortable zone, but I'll make rap records as long as I feel I have something to rap about.

You're more constrained when you're wealthy. Or when you're making a bigger film and people complain about no budgets; but having a small amount of money to make a film means you're at your absolute freest to express yourself as an artist.

I like the idea of not having to do stuff for the money, and if I want to, I can pick indie projects for the rest of my life and be quite happy doing that.

I hope I'm in a position to make stuff that I really want to make as opposed to stuff that I just have to make for money reasons, or to sustain a certain marquee value.

I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.

The reason I did fashion was it was the only way to get paid to do anything creative. You couldn't support yourself as an 'artist' - I hate that word. The only way you could be 'arty' was as a fashion photographer, because it still had a certain amount of integrity involved.

I have worried about getting pigeon-holed, but now I think I've done enough weird, offbeat stuff not to be. And I also know that I do things for the right reasons: I've made my money, so I don't have to say yes to anything.

When you're kept by a patron you don't have to duke it out in the media marketplace for dollars and for readers. In some ways that's a blessing because it takes a lot of pressure off you.