Creative Exploitation Quotes

Films always make everyone else rich save the author.

Did Alan Moore get screwed on his contract? Of course. Lots of people get screwed, but we still have Spider-Man and lots of other heroes.

I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.

If you wanna make money in music, you're better off being on the business end of it a lot of the time. And also as a musician, if you do make money, it means you had to bite and scratch and kick the whole way to not get ripped off, because at every corner, there's somebody there waiting to trip you up and take a bigger chunk.

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

I'm just saying the producers and people who work on music are getting left out - that's when it starts getting criminal. It's like you're working hard, and you're not receiving. In any other business, people would be standing before Congress. They have antitrust laws against this kind of behavior.

We're in an era where the demand is for immediate hits that are destined to become obsolescent. Six months later, everyone forgets the artist and the tune. It's become like a con job. Producers, engineers, lawyers and accountants all make money, but the artists don't.

Hollywood is a showman's paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making - and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay.

Giving a record company an album is like giving a gangster your baby or something.

I do not always listen again but if something strikes me, I exploit it.

Stories come from other shows at other studios where only 2,000 rounds were actually used and the money for the other 3,000 went right into the studio pockets. Corners were cut and that production suffered. Knock wood, that hasn't happened to us.

There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

Not only do the Americans not defend our films, they buy them up just for remakes. It is shameful to kneel at their feet.

Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood.

If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art, and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that's not cool.

We, the artists, make the stuff they sell and they're like ticks on our backs, sucking the life out of us.

It always felt like the price of being a writer was that you would - even in the most terrible moments, there was a little phantom version of you sitting on your shoulder with a notebook going, I can use this. OK, look at the way that the light is glinting off the broken plastic on the road next to the blood. You can use this. And it was always a very strange feeling.