Creative Corruption Quotes

An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.

It's very, very corrupting to the spirit, doing comedy. And you have to be almost a saint, like Jack Benny was, like Steve Martin is, to avoid the corrupting of it, because there's very little work where the actual work and the reward are simultaneous, and comedy is that.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.

The past is not the present: pretending it is corrupts art and thus both rots the mind and shrivels the imagination and conscience.

We had many good directors - John Carpenter, Brian De Palma - but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall.

Some writers thrive on the contact with the commerce of success; others are corrupted by it. Perhaps, like losing one's virginity,it is not as bad (or as good) as one feared it was going to be.

In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.