Martie Maguire Quotes

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

Who said that artists should sell their soul, expose everything about themselves?

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

If you want to capitulate to what commercial needs are, you can always be commercially valuable, but I'm not interested in being that.

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.

Hollywood seduces a person who's used to making theater, art, and having success on their own terms and then tries to squish them into a box and, eventually, throws the box out.

I don't see Hollywood as the big enemy, because this is where the money is, and not all of the companies are doing studio movies. I'm not tempted to sell out. If I'm going to become well known, I want it to be for something I'm proud of.

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

But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

For your own self-respect and sanity, your creative freedom, you have to be careful that you don't rely too much on other people's opinions of what you do because it can stunt and inhibit you.

I've got an overly developed sense of what selling out is, and I of course worry about it too much.

I'd rather sell 10,000 records that represent me than 2 million that don't represent me at all.

I don't want to be 'box-office girl,' but I don't want to be 'that indie girl' either.

If you were to hold me to a standard of, 'What are you doing, singing about a scratch-off ticket at your level of success?' then my music's gonna be ridiculous.

I love producing shows. And so when you're on a show where other people are making decisions you don't necessarily agree with it, after a while you start to feel like a passenger.

There's no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don't try to adapt it, make it commercial.

Anybody who goes searching can find enough artistic things I've done that nobody can ever say I sold out.

What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.

I never want to record something that I'm not proud of just because I think it might be a big hit. There's no positive about that because if you record a song you hate and it's a big hit, then you're singing a song every night that you hate. And if you record a song that you hate and it isn't a hit, then you sold out for no reason.

I suppose we'll make money off our album and our singles and stuff, but, like, they were made as we wanted them, exactly with what we had to say, and done exactly how we wanted them, right? And, like, we didn't put them out to make money. We put them out because we wanted to do them, do you know what I mean?

I think that's part of the battle of defining yourself as an artist. You're constantly fighting the pressure from outside to be pigeonholed and deliver more of what people already liked.

Obviously, I would like to play to bigger audiences and have a bit more success, but not if I have to commercialize.

When we were writing for Panic whether we knew it or not, having that name over the songs we were trying to do made me second guess things and change things. I started to go against my instincts.