If you want to be an entertainer, then go be an entertainer and give people what they want. If you want to be an artist, then you have to be true to yourself, and you have to be prepared to confront expectations - and you have to be prepared to disappoint your fans, too.
Interpretation
Pursue your passion with authenticity, even at the risk of disappointing others.
This quote emphasizes the distinction between being an entertainer and an artist, highlighting that true artistry requires honesty and self-awareness. While entertainers may cater to audience desires, artists must remain true to their vision, even if it means facing disappointment from fans who have different expectations.
In practice
In a speech about pursuing creative careers, this quote can inspire aspiring artists to embrace authenticity.
To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.
Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.
As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.
a poet is someone who is abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement. Which is to say the highest form of concentration possible: fascination; to report on the electrifying experience of being
Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
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