Creative Worth Quotes

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

I'm extremely interested in art, every form of art, but I'm interested in it when it's good and interested in it when it's interesting.

Art is not disposable.

Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

In Hollywood, writers are considered only the first draft of human beings.

If artists do have ideas, they're often not great.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

Money is something that can be measured; art is not. It's all subjective.

I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.

I don't feel like I possess a particular political intelligence, and when I read work that does, I feel like somebody else is going to have the right political thing to say. As a citizen, I feel an enormous need to respond, and immediately post-election, I felt like, What is my work worth? Should I quit what I'm doing and go work on the 2018 election now? How is what I'm putting into the world meaningful?

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

I honestly don't feel that it's my music that's under-appreciated. I think that it's me that's under-appreciated. As an artist, period.

I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.

A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.

If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.

Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.

I don't think [price] reflects if the work is good or bad.A good artist shouldn't be nervous about that.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

Interested listeners have only to hear the recording to find out if those guys, who go to such pains to undervalue my work, are right. All people have to do is listen to realize it is a beautiful record.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.