Louise Bogan Quotes

It would take some encouragement for me to accept other people's opinions on how I should present my work because my work means a lot to me.

I think artists are interested in what people think of them.

I have become so used to having people say, 'We loved your movie' instead of 'We read your book' that now I merely say, 'Thanks.'

Ideally, musicians belong outside the Establishment. When they cross that line, it's like something in them has died.

Do people have an idea of who they think I am? Yes, and that's fine with me. My music will speak for itself.

I want people to understand me as a person with views, not just performing songs.

No sensible author wants anything but praise.

I keep getting compared to Marina and the Diamonds because she's kind of in the same place as me at the moment. It's quite annoying being compared, actually, because it almost downgrades your work and makes you feel like you're just another female artist.

When you come from nowhere, I am fully aware of the fact that people have to compare you to other artists to kind of place you.

As a musician, basically the masses never thought I was a musician.

There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.

The artist part of me always wants to be appreciated. I read every review. But I never wanted to seek validation by awards or anything controlled by politics.

For artists, we're always looking for approval. We're putting our artwork out there and saying, 'What do you think?'

You start creating art through the people that are looking at you, trying to route it through their sensibilities or their eyes, and then it's not you anymore.

I'd like to say I don't care, but I do. 'Cause when you put out a record, you try to do it for yourself first, and you want your audience to accept it, but you also want the press to accept it, too, because it validates what you do.

I think the most important thing is you need to have a very, very clear idea of who you are as an artist before you let other people tell you who you are.

Believing in one’s own art becomes harder and harder when the public response grows fonder.

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

I had to learn to do stuff only for myself, and stop thinking about pleasing some imaginary client or boss. It's a habit that many artists get into that have worked in commercial ventures.

Most artists I know had one person in their life who told them they were the second coming of the baby Jesus, and another person that told them they weren't worth anything, and they believed them both, you know?

Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.

I could be an alternative comic. I could be that really dark - I was - I was a very dark comic to begin with. I could be that guy, and the only reason I didn't is that I wanted to make money. I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be liked more than I wanted to be admired.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

I feel like you have to constantly keep proving yourself, and you have to constantly keep getting out there and showing them you're more than just that one song on the radio that's just playing. And that's what I had to do the first time around; I had to keep going out there and keep performing live.