Quotes / Artist Disillusionment

Literature

Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

—Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

"I'm a wrestler, not a stuntman," he wrote. "And even a stunt man has time to strap himself in. I'm a professional wrestler and I get paid to wrestle in a ring. What am I doing fighting in the back taking falls on concrete and doing stunts in speeding cars?" He said he was especially appalled to think that he was doing the same sort of thing that had resulted in his brother Owen's death.

"So what's the point of all this?" he concluded. "I'm not sure I know. I just know I've emptied my head and my heart and this is as real as it gets. Maybe the whole wrestling business is pathetic... including me."

—The Death of WCW, on the end of Bret Hart's career

Web Original

By all accounts he was grieving for the loss of Katy Manning and Roger Delgado, he was working with the knowledge that the role that had made him a household name was soon to come to an end and he was no longer surrounded by comforts such as UNIT and the Brigadier on a regular basis...Pertwee seems to breeze through one scene to the next without a care in the world. Is this really the same Doctor who screamed out in frustration when the world was burning in Inferno?

—Joe Ford on Doctor Who, "The Monster of Peladon"

Rick Berman and Brannon Braga had given well over a decade of each of their lives to the franchise, and had seen all of that time and energy discarded by a network that would not last much longer either. The duo had given everything to Star Trek, only to find themselves hated in the fan press and cut off at the knees by a new management that understood nothing of the franchise.

—TheM0vieBlog on Star Trek: Enterprise, "These Are the Voyages..."

It's an old story: a visionary director tired of constantly having to justify his mad-prophet vision to buttoned-down bean counters with calculators for hearts so he sets up shop on his own. It's gonna be different, this time, see? This time, the inmates will be Running the Asylum and making mad moolah in the process. Three months later, the now penniless, despondent visionary comes crawling back to his old studio, begging for any job, no matter how dispiriting or humiliating.

— Nathan Rabin, My Year Of Flops #95: One From The Heart

The experience was so bad for Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin that they’ve referred to it as 'horrible,' and Hewlett turned down what Wikipedia calls a 'big money’ offer from Dreamworks for the film rights to Gorillaz rather than lose creative control. But yeah, 'mess' is kind of the word for it.

—Matt Wilson and Chris Sims on Tank Girl

It just feels like after his debacle involving Mia Farrow and his underage stepdaughter, (Woody) Allen is perfectly fine by running on cruise control. Whereas before he was always venturing into new territory and breaking new ground, now he says 'fuck it' and is content playing it safe with his drawer ideas. What if a mobster became a playwright? Fuck it, I can stretch that out to 90 minutes and ride things out another year. A Greek tragedy set to banal upper class New Yorkers' petty issues? Fuck it, I don’t feel like doing anything meaningful.

—Miles Antwiler on Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

Ray Romano comes over, awkwardly displaying his teeth as in every single photo of him that exists, and says in his depressed Kermit voice: 'Are you ready for the scene, Gene?' Hackman slowly turns his head. 'No, Ray. I don't think I am.' He walks off of the set, starts running, and never stops. They have to finish the movie with CGI. (That's how it went in my imagination, anyway.)

—Cracked, "5 Movies That Made Huge Stars Quit Acting Forever"

Following in the footsteps of Jake Lloyd and Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen is calling out Star Wars for ripping a stinky fart on his career... there was a reason why you went from seeing his dumb face everywhere to seeing it only when you searched the words “10 Worst Characters in Star Wars” on the internet.

—DListed, "And just like that, the My Life Got Shittier After The Release Of The Star Wars Prequels club gets its newest member"

Alright now that I have your ears as well as your spines; allow me to indulge myself for a moment and tell you all what every content creator has always wanted to say to their audience: FUCK ALL Y'ALL!!''

— Kabaya Akihito, Sword Art Online Abridged

Real Life

Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.

—Bertrand Russell

I know Marc was really looking forward to the moment when Ben would finally don the Spider-Man suit, and getting the chance to write about the "new" web-slinger, but that pivotal moment just kept getting pushed further and further back, amidst more and more gimmicky crossovers and an overall series direction that was spiraling out of control. So, unfortunately, he left.

—Editor/Writer Glenn Greenberg on J.M. DeMattesis and The Clone Saga, The Life of Reilly

"I remember listening to an interview with Colin on the radio talking about all the marvelous things he was gonna do with the Doctor, how it's gonna be different. And I think, 'You haven't started it yet. You don't know what you're up against.'"

—Peter Davison on leaving Doctor Who

"And we go through rewrite after rewrite after rewrite and the script doesn’t get any better and I see what is going on and I don’t want to be trapped in an office where we have hypocrites running the place. I can’t deal with this, my health was already starting to suffer. So I started taking vitamins and nothing is getting better and I said 'I can’t deal with this hypocrisy'."

—David Gerrold, script editor for Star Trek: The Next Generation

"You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid."

— Dave Chappelle to a heckling audience

After reading a few thousand emails like the ones above, I seriously contemplated taking down my site and just posting links to animal porn for you retards. You're all idiots, and I've lost what little respect I had for you.

— Maddox

"I just gave up, because they didn't care, and they didn't know what they were doing."

—WCW announcer Bobby Heenan

im done. FEZ II is canceled. goodbye.

—Phil Fish

You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, "Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life." If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!

—Hayao Miyazaki

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

— Johnny Rotten, at the final Sex Pistols show in 1978.

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