Artistic Standards Quotes

If I don't feel it when I'm sitting there, if it doesn't give me the feeling I got when I heard 'Pony' or 'So Anxious' or 'In Those Jeans,' I scrap it.

If you are ever completely satisfied with something you have written, you are setting your sights too low. But if you can't let go of your material even after you have done the best that you can with it, you are setting your sights too high.

All the arts, to varying degrees, involve some kind of a compromise. This being so, how far need the radio dramatist go to meet the public without losing sight of himself and his own standards of value?

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Mainstream Hollywood makes a few good movies a year. And in order to be in one of those, you have to be one of five people. Hollywood makes many bad movies too, which I'm not interested in being a part of. But there are only a few good independent movies a year, and many, many bad ones. I want to be in good movies, and I want people to see them.

I grew up in a renaissance period, a very lucky time when the greatest music ever made was also the most commercial. We'll never see that again, so for me, there's only one criteria, which is greatness. That's all I care about. Is what I'm doing reaching for greatness? Whether I achieve it or not, that is one hundred percent of my criteria.

With Dr. Dre, he's a perfectionist. A lot of people ask why 'Detox' is taking so long. It's because Dre is somebody that is trying to top what he's done. Will he do it? I don't know if he ever will, but I respect that he's trying to do so. You have to wait for a masterpiece.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.

I just feel like I'm an artist that still has set a standard for artists that come up to follow and be like...So, yeah, I guess I'm a legend somewhat, I guess in my own right, but I still got a long ways to go.

I can't remember ever being really bored. I find life very interesting, actually. I think some other musicians are always looking for something to give them an idea, but I find I have to reject 90 percent of my ideas because they don't live up to some self-imposed standard. That's also why I don't make a record once a year. I throw so many things out, and I have to have something to say.

Even Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he'd done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work-the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo's. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.

I am very choosy and keen to do good roles.

Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

I'd rather not make films than make bad ones.

Wayne and Drake, it takes them so long to do a song. I understand why, because they want it to be perfect. But I think I can do a perfect song in 10 minutes.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.

Many years ago, I was actually hired to write the sequel to 'Independence Day.' And I wrote a sequel. And they paid me a boatload of money to go write this thing. And after I wrote it, I read it and I gave them back the money and I said, 'Look, this is an okay movie I just wrote. But it's not worthy of the sequel to 'Independence Day.'

I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

Instead of asking what's wrong with rampant consumerism, we ought to be asking, 'What justifies it?' Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.

Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.

The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of construction. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.

This is not a change of career for me. Just an expansion of it. I have contracts and obligations and business partners who are counting on me. And I would only want to do another movie if it's as good as this one.