Commercially Quotes & Sayings

I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money. — Christine McVie

The real harm of term extension comes not from these famous works. The real harm is to the works that are not famous, not commercially exploited, and no longer available as a result. — Lawrence Lessig

Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor. — Alex Steffen

Not taboo - it's just that straight actors still risk their careers commercially and economically. They have to please the crowd - they're movie stars; their image is their industry. It goes beyond acting. — Ang Lee

Success surely comes with conscience in the long run, other things being equal. Capacity and fidelity are commercially profitable qualities. — Henry Ward Beecher

What it does, that other resources do not, is gather under one cover a body of broadly applicable design principles, coupled with practical ideas and suggestions for making specific instruments. If you are interested in exploring instrumental sound, building something musical from scratch, or composing and performing with anything other than the usual commercially made instruments, then you will be glad to have the information provided here. So will anyone, for that matter, who simply wants to better understand musical sound. Acoustical — Bart Hopkin

There is a long and interesting tradition of really marginal left-field music that becomes commercially successful. And I will, for a brief minute, fit into that tradition. — Moby

One of the reasons that I really don't mind that people are selling Linux commercially is exactly because it does make me feel good that people use the product. — Linus Torvalds

London is the most commercially important city in Europe, and it's the most populous city. It should be for the whole of the European continent what New York is to America. That's what it should be. — Boris Johnson

Values cannot be speedily forgotten if it is inconvenient or commercially expedient. Values have to have meaning and longevity; otherwise they are valueless. You cannot embrace innovation up to a point or only sometimes. Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention; striking cords with people to stir their emotions; and commitment to imagination. It is easy to be cynical about such things, much harder to be successful. — Richard Branson

That's the reason support for the National Endowment of the Arts is so important. It enables those ventures that aren't viable commercially to be done. — David Selby

I am very aware now that music is a business, but there is also a way to go about making music that is true to yourself as opposed to doing, you know, just going through the motions and making things that would just be commercially successful. — Ronnie Montrose

We are vulnerable in the military and in our governments, but I think we're most vulnerable to cyber attacks commercially. This challenge is going to significantly increase. It's not going to go away. — Michael Mullen

For example, there are numbers of chemists who occupy themselves exclusively with the study of dyestuffs. They discover facts that are useful to scientific chemistry; but they do not rank as genuine scientific men. The genuine scientific chemist cares just as much to learn about erbium-the extreme rarity of which renders it commercially unimportant-as he does about iron. He is more eager to learn about erbium if the knowledge of it would do more to complete his conception of the Periodic Law, which expresses the mutual relations of the elements. — Charles Sanders Peirce

The movies I made early on may not have been great, but they were all commercially successful. — Christina Ricci

Arcitc Harp seal pup populations are declining as they are commercially hunted for oil and fur and global warming causes the ice where pups are born to break up and melt. Now these sweet and adorable pups face yet another human threat: oil spills. — Zoe Helene

Everything is done by CONTRACT. It DOESN'T matter whether it's Civil or Criminal. There is NO LAW anymore because there is NO MONEY (Of substance) and since there is NO LAW and since there is NO MONEY everything is done by CONTRACT, it's AGREEMENT OF THE PARTIES. So remember, that theoretically anything that is done COMMERCIALLY in the CIVIL WORLD by any kind of "accounts", its BASED ON A SIGNATURE. — Jack Smith

The chance to be both artistically appreciated and commercially appreciated ... That's what you hope for. — Gerard Butler

I have a hard time doing anything someone else tells me to do! I've always been driven to follow my own path and not be pushed down another lane because some executive thought I could be more commercially successful or whatever. — Cyndi Lauper

What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers. — John Connolly

When I make decisions based on other circumstances, things don't necessarily go so well. So sometimes, even if something seems commercially tempting, I've learned that if it's not what's in your heart, it's probably not what you should do. — Renny Harlin

The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh. — Steve Albini

The circle of salt's potential victims grew at an alarming rate. Part of Dahl's research into the evils of salt involved breeding a strain of salt-sensitive rats, in which he induced hypertension by feeding them commercially prepared baby food that contained added sodium. In April 1970, newspapers ran an Associated Press report about Dahl's findings under scary headlines like "Baby Food Salt May Be Harmful, Researcher Says." The report quoted Dahl calling salted baby food "a needless kind of risk. — Alan Levinovitz

The thing that I think a lot of us forget is that part of the fault is the books ... you get this sort of cycle that as they become less important commercially they begin protecting their egos by talking more and more to each other and establishing themselves as this kind of tight cloistered world that doesn't really have anything to do with regular readers. — David Foster Wallace

Sadly, commercially-produced, frozen broccoli lacks the ability to form sulforaphane because the vegetables are flash-cooked before they are frozen. — Michael Greger

A lot of people don't remember anything since 'Ice Ice Baby,' but I've got 3 records out since then and they're all successes - but not commercially. — Vanilla Ice

I had to fight the intellectual label when I started in television, because, first of all, it's not going to help you commercially, and also, it wasn't particularly true of me. I mean, if anybody thought I was an intellectual, they probably had never really seen one. — Dick Cavett

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites. — Michael Pollan

Many mainstream winemakers use indigenous yeasts rather than commercially grown ones to ferment their grapes - precisely what natural winemakers advocate. — Roger Morris

The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful. — Orson Welles

My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make. — Stanley Tucci

I want to make a film that is commercially successful because that means that the larger cinema-going audience around the world like the movie, which is my goal. That's my job, to make films that people respond to. — Neill Blomkamp

What people intuitively grasped was the new efficiences in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones. Although this phenomenon is most obvious in entertainment and media, it's an easy leap to eBay to see it at work more broadly, from cars to crafts. Seen broadly, it's clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance - what happens when the bottlenecks and stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone. — Chris Anderson

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. — Allan Bloom

The decline is in paper values, not in tangible goods and services ... America is now in the eighth year of prosperity as commercially defined. The former great periods of prosperity in America averaged eleven years. On this basis we now have three more years to go before the tailspin. — Stuart Chase

All the music that I've made in the past I've believed in. I think some of it has been more commercially successful than others, but it wasn't premeditated. — David Sanborn

I was working with Bill Graham management at the time and it was obvious to everyone concerned that albums like Open Fire, while they were good for me creatively, were not going to be commercially successful. — Ronnie Montrose

You can crash on one set of rocks or the other set of rocks, and they crashed on the other set of rocks, which was probably being too little to be commercially viable. — David Talbot

You know, you want everything you do, obviously, to be a success critically and commercially. But what you find out as you go along is that everything won't. — Lee Ann Womack

Carmen Jones was the first all-Negro film that became a great box-office success. It established the fact that pictures with Negro artists, pictures dealing with the folklore of Negro life, were commercially feasible. This was a sign of growth that had occurred in the United States and throughout the world. — Harry Belafonte

To make films like 'X-Men' work commercially - and also have some class - is one of the hardest things there is to do. I want to be seen to be able to cross lots of genres and still be 'fair dinkum,' as we say in Australia, which means genuine and true and, well, unique. — Hugh Jackman

I didn't have an affinity for horror. But I knew that commercially it was viable. — Jack Kirby

As he found beauty in the hamburger, he thought hot dogs unattractive - both aesthetically and commercially. — David Halberstam

Nothing threatens freedom of the personality and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man (the "gray mass," to use the cynical term of bourgeois prognosticators) by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship. — Andrei Sakharov

You have to learn to overcome those feelings when somebody is negative about a production you love or if that production doesn't do well commercially. After 'Gone With the Wind', I felt older. I even thought about quitting the business. — Jill Paice

A gentleman of ambition is aware of the people he wishes to be associated with both socially and commercially. He knows that moving through different levels of society is akin to stepping through different rooms in an enormous house, each door leading to a grander environment than the last. He may, of course, settle for the comfort of any room he reaches. Alternatively, he may continue through successive doors to surround himself with even greater fineries and riches. — Chris Murray

Love is a hollow word which seems at home in song lyrics and greeting cards, until you fall in love and discover it's disconcerting power. Depression means nothing more than the blues, commercially packaged angst, a hole in the ground; until you find it's black weight settled inside your mother's chest, disrupting her breathing, leaching her days, and yours, of colour and the nights of rest. — Jerry Pinto

The 'Best of British' is a positive thing that's bandied around, but also it's applied pressure to our country in terms of economic growth. I think we've always felt the rest of the world is so much more powerful in terms of being commercially viable, but we can take great pride in our level of creativity. — Erin O'Connor

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility. — Lee De Forest

When I did the album Electric Circus, not only was it not commercially received. But even the critics and hip-hop community was like "What is this?" At that moment, I could've been written off. But I had to believe because I really love what I do. I'm passionate about it. If 12 million recognize it, that's beautiful. If 12,000 do, that's beautiful. But I'm always going to put my heart and soul in it and I'm going to shoot for the stars and go for the highest levels of recognition and creativity. I definitely doubted myself at the time. But it always come back to believing what I do. — Common

she approached the town of Pampa. This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept. No relief in any sense of the word. The land so commercially and agriculturally marginal that Pampans thought nothing of wasting it by the half acre, so that each low and ugly building sat by itself. Dusty dead or dying halfheartedly planted trees floated by in Leila's headlights. To her they were Texan and therefore lovely in their way. The Sonic parking — Jonathan Franzen

The Tower of Babel" ...
The undersigned citizens, being artists, painters, sculptors, architects, and others devoted to and desirous preserving the amenities of Paris, wish to protest, in the name of our national good taste, against such an erection in the very heart of our city, as the monstrous and useless Eiffel Tower, already christened ... " The Tower of Babel" ...
How much longer is the City of Paris to be a play-ground for these barbarous and sordid imaginations which disfigure and dishonor her? For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercially minded America rejected, is a public dishonor to our city. All our historic buildings, our monuments of rare and appealing beauty, are dwarfed and humiliated by this monstrous apotheosis of the factory chimney whose odious shadow will lie over the city ...
Plea to the Exposition Director in opposition to the Eiffel Tower, signed by artists and writers and published in Le Temps, 1887 — Carol McCleary

Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in. — Michael Eric Dyson

I was not doing what I was told to do. And they sued me for making music "uncharacteristic of Neil Young." That was Geffen Rocords' biggeest mistake, I think. The mistakes all started when I caved and didn't give them Island in the Sun. They wanted me to be commercially successful, and I wanted to be an artist expressing myself-those two goals are not always compatible. I was expecting to have the same artistic freedom that I had at Asylum Records, but Geffen Records wanted me to be a smash, selling millions of records. Most important, Geffen was not a hands-on at Geffen Records. He had other people doing that. It showed. — Neil Young

I like the idea that people hear my stuff, and if it's commercially successful, that's a good sign that it's being heard. — Paul McCartney

You read the papers and you watch television, so you know the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America. — Greg Palast

Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex. — Nicholas D. Kristof

If you compare the size of our reserves of Saudi Arabia and the whole Middle East, it's like three times as much as all of that combined and that's just the easily, readily available 1800 billion barrels and there are probably 3 billion barrels that are commercially just under that, available. — Chris Cannon

It is immensely enjoyable to work for an album because there's a lot more creative freedom. In films sometimes, all that the makers care about is making the music commercially appealing. — Shreya Ghoshal

The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially, which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so did slavery, and slavery's becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil War. What — Nicholas Lemann

You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly commercially driven. And some if it is important art. I think 'The Simpsons' is important art. On the other hand, it's also, in my opinion, relentlessly corrosive to the soul and everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous. Maybe I'm old but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I have to walk away and look at a flower.
If there's something to be talked about, that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the 'inner sap,' the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people. — David Foster Wallace

I learned a lot of details about 1920s clothes, cars, kitchen appliances, and food. I had a character eating peanut butter in one scene until I learned that peanut butter wasn't commercially packaged and sold until 1924. — Laura Moriarty

Now, it's undeniably true that male writers (including yours truly) are generally and commercially allowed to write about "girl stuff" without being penalized for doing so. In part this is the same old shit it's always been ... I've said before that men who write mostly about men win prizes for revealing the human condition, while women who write about both men and women are filed away as writing "womens' issues." Likewise, in fantasy, the imprimatur of a dude somehow makes stuff like romance, relationship drama, introspection, and adorable animal companions magically not girly after all.
In a sense, we male fantasists are allowed to be like money launderers for girl cooties."
[Game of Thrones and Invisible Cootie Vectors (blog post, March 30, 2014)] — Scott Lynch

Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might. — Johan Huizinga

There are certainly good examples of incredibly brilliant, beautiful music that has been made commercially available and sold everywhere. But I would say that, for the most part, quantity certainly does not speak well for quality. — Ian MacKaye

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort. — Craig Newmark

I was in rock music in London when it was the height of Brit pop, with The Kinks revival and Suede and Blur and Oasis, and all of those really great bands that were of a certain style. If I'd really been smart and commercially minded, I would have just got myself a blazer and some Stay Press and some Fred Perry tops, and just gone out and tried to do it like everyone else. Instead, I did this ridiculous thing of trying to do this music. — Gavin Rossdale

I think that selling rights is a bad move commercially, not just morally. It cheapens the songs. When people come to my concerts, they often hold up candles when we do "Let It Be." I don't think they'd do that anymore if the song suddenly became part of an Oldsmobile ad. — Paul McCartney

All the work that I do, whether or not it ends up being commercially successful or not, feels like the most important thing to me while I'm doing it. I try to take something away from every project, and so they all feel like milestones for one reason or another. — Michael Ian Black

Foreign audiences are used to seeing Mexico in other sorts of movies. 'Casi divas' is a step toward a more commercially successful cinema, without the violence, blood and exaggerations. The movie reflects a more human Mexico, while remaining a chick flick, although it is not a romantic comedy. — Ana Layevska

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable. — Charles Baxter

I had a moment when I first got on Supernatural when I was like, "Oh my god, people are paying attention to me, I have fans, maybe I should cultivate an image and try to seem really cool." I had this moment of being commercially self conscious and it took maybe a month for me to realize no, this is not who I ****ing am, and here's a picture of me in drag. Which is, by the way, so much more liberating and relaxing. There's not a more sure fire way to give a stifled, boring, empty, vapid, meaningless interview than trying to say the right thing ... — Misha Collins

While never ultimately commercially successful, the Dreamcast is home to the most expensive-to-produce games made to date. Shenmue and Shenmue 2 cost more than $70 million at the time; Sega would have needed to sell two copies of each game for each Dreamcast — Sam Pettus

It's not that Monsanto is making money out of the blue. It's making money by coercing and literally forcing people to pay for what was free. Take water, for instance. Water has always been free. We've never paid for drinking water. The World Bank says the reason water has been misused is because it was never commercially priced. But the reason it's been misused is because it was wasted by the big users-industry, which polluted it. — Vandana Shiva

I would not have been able to accomplish a lot of what I did professionally had I not learned to fly myself and owned an airplane. For example, I was able to fly to an exhibition for the day and be back home in time for dinner. I never would have been able to do that flying commercially. — Arnold Palmer

Fashion and public relations share a charter to turn life to their own advantage, to make malleable and commercially useful the naked human perception. Both interests consider life too small, dull, and colorless to get itself sufficiently noticed without the lobbying efforts of professionals. — Kennedy Fraser

It's striking how commercially viable that impulse for instant intimacy is right now, especially in songs and writing. — Suzanne Vega

A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak. — Tom Hooper

As a consumer an individual expresses "personal or self-regarding wants and interests"; as a citizen she expresses her "judgements about what is right or good". The mistake of market approaches to environmental problems is that they transform an issue that requires public deliberation by citizens into one to be resolved by consumer preferences. The market responds only to those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the commercially inarticulate, both those who are contingently so (the poor) and those who are necessarily so (future generations and non-humans) cannot be adequately represented. — John O'Neill

Phoenix was a tougher record, a little more commercially accessible record. — Dan Fogelberg

TV is and will remain the leading medium - whether it's public broadcasting, commercially funded Free-TV, or whether it is our new growth engine, Pay-TV; whether it is distributed via broadcasting or on demand: The future of TV is - TV! — Gerhard Zeiler

Magazines don't have enough confidence to have their own style, so they use a borrowed style. That is shocking to me, but your perception is very accurate. It's a way to be more commercially viable, but to me, that's not having a style, that's having a schtick. — Gregory Heisler

What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up. — Tony Abbott

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art. — Kailash Kher

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared. — Michael Cunningham

You pretend to be other people to write their stories." He made it sound like a bad thing. "Writing is a craft. Not everyone has the time to learn it in a way that makes it commercially viable." Not everyone knew where to put a semicolon, or in the case of the pop star whose biography I'd just written, that it wasn't a body part. — A.A. Paton

In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. — Alan Moore

Even if major funding is obtained for cold fusion, conceivably the phenomenon could suffer from problems as intractable as those of hot fusion. It may never work reliably or generate enough energy to be commercially viable. — Charles Platt

If you can write (and don't kid yourself that you can, if you can't) and you have ideas that are commercially viable and will engage the reader's interest, go for it. Make sure you have something unique to offer. I enjoy the work of writers who give you something you won't find anywhere else. — Joel McIver

I think it's important that nobody forgets that although Hollywood commercially dominates the world cinema, in fact what comes out of the filmmaking here is only a tiny slice out of the massive amount of operation that goes on around the world. — Mike Leigh

As always, I wonder if I'll get through the winter. Then when winter is over, I wonder about the summer. But that's because the system decided which author shall be commercially successful. As I said, the most vicious of them all is The New York Times, because it pretends to be literary and impartial, and it's really this opinionated, myopic, stupid giant of incompetence. — James Purdy

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues, and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory. — Harmony Korine

It has always been very difficult for writers to survive commercially in India because the market was so small. But that's not true at all any more. It's one of the world's fastest growing and most vibrant markets for books, especially in English. — Aravind Adiga

What can I tell you? I continue to be creative, but have only been commercially successful outside of the U.S. — Holly Johnson

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good." — Larry Ellison

Unless somebody who's already eleven thousand times platinum is like, "We're ushering this project in," it's not really gonna pop commercially. — Pharoahe Monch

It takes more than driving to become an IndyCar driver. Gone are the days when drivers show up Friday morning and go home Sunday night. We're all integral to our partnerships, commercially, motorsports. We're as much champions in the boardroom as we are on the racetrack. — Charlie Kimball

If you want to capitulate to what commercial needs are, you can always be commercially valuable, but I'm not interested in being that. — Ken Hensley

hard to create. One will very likely
be rejected with the rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to the development of commercially — Eric Von Hippel

I do support artists standing by their beliefs and walking with integrity. We have to find a better way to commercially exploit music while giving artists their proper respect. This cannot be done while taking their contributions for granted or trying to control the scope of their growth and power through threats and fear tactics. — Lauryn Hill