Top 100 Indie Quotes
#1. I don't think I'm kind of universally known. I think in the indie world I'm probably better known than in some mainstream Hollywood terms.
Steve Coogan
#2. I was one of those kids who had never seen an indie film before I got to college. If it wasn't a big, huge tentpole movie, or if it wasn't on the radio, I hadn't experienced it.
John Krasinski
#3. I identify as being an independent artist. I think people often forget that Indie is actually short for independent. For me, the word has a meaning more than what it connotes from an industry standpoint.
Mirah
#4. Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.
Alex Kapranos
#5. I really love doing indie projects, I think the characters that are available in indie games especially, like a lot of the indie games I've done, have been really rich interesting characters for someone of my vocal range.
Ashly Burch
#6. Smash market vs. mass market: Indie authors delve deep into expressive vertical genres. Book stores hold 90-day-credit-return literature. Why wait? In five years, Indie authors will be both.
Peter Prasad
#7. Golden Heart finalist in the prestigious RWA writing contest. Finalist in the International Digital Awards Semi-finalist in the Best Indie Books of 2012. A featured
E. Ayers
#8. There was no indie rock band in the 90s at the level of, like, Grizzly Bear. I listen to their records and it's crazy how good they sound. That really freaks me out.
Travis Morrison
#9. I think in the world of indie music there's this sort of false modesty.
Alex Kapranos
#10. Like most people, there are things I love about Amazon. It's cheap, it's fast, and it's at my doorstep. But Amazon will never replace the important role my local indie plays in my community.
Patrick Carman
#11. I am a huge, raving fan of writer Matt Fraction. His semi-indie 'Casanova' series is an ongoing masterpiece of 21st-century American comics - and his run on 'Immortal Iron Fist' with Ed Brubaker was pure, yummy martial-arts-fantasy deliciousness.
Michael Chabon
#12. I think the indie-rock world is very creative. They're always looking for something new, and I think of all the instruments we have in the world, the ones that are the most creative and interesting are the electronic ones. There are so many sounds and plug-ins you can use.
Tiesto
#13. To me, being a classical snob in the highest possible way and being an indie snob is just as bad!
Mika.
#14. 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,' while not nearly the masterpiece proclaimed by many critics, is certainly a fascinating cross-species: a big-budget summer action fantasy with a sylvan, indie-film vibe, and a war movie that dares ask its audience to root for the peacemakers.
Richard Corliss
#15. I'm dying to do a tiny indie and play something totally naturalistic without any sort of constraints on me. Something where I can shock everyone.
Lily James
#16. I have a day job Monday to Friday. I work at a record label in Brooklyn called Ba Da Bing. It's a great indie label and I listen to music all day. I meet people online and find out about the cool new music blogs.
Sharon Van Etten
#17. There's an audience out there for all these different types of things. Whether it's comedy, motion-picture drama, family movie or a cool, cutting-edge indie, it's nice to know that I can span all those different genres.
Ralph Macchio
#18. You are at the mercies of the dailies. With an indie you don't have that.
Dianne Wiest
#19. I would love to do a small indie comedy, like a Wes Anderson movie or, like, an ensemble comedy like 'The Royal Tenenbaums' or 'Little Miss Sunshine.' I like comedies like that, that have a lot of heart and are about family dynamics.
Jerry Trainor
#20. Indie rock is very healthy, there's a lot of diversity and a lot of creativity, but it does not have the revolutionary spirit of the late-70s punk scene in regards to design and politics and fashion and stuff like that.
Bruce Pavitt
#21. If you are a superstar, or whatever you want to call yourself, a person who's had outrageous success, and you decide to go indie and tell the record companies to screw themselves? That takes a certain amount of courage. And bullheadedness, really.
Daryl Hall
#22. I think it would be different to work with a guy like Kanye West or Jay-Z, those guys are so phenomenal, but just to work with a rapper, I don't think is really my thing. I really like songs, like true songs. Like indie songs.
Tiesto
#23. The American indie underground made music for like-minded people who thought for themselves. Thinking for yourself is intrinsically subversive.
Michael Azerrad
#24. When we opened Babbo, we were an indie band. Now we're kinda Apple. We have 19 restaurants and 2,800 employees, we are no longer perceived as the indie band although we think of ourselves as the indie band, and we operate our restaurants as individual indie bands.
Mario Batali
#25. I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
Carrie Brownstein
#26. I just filmed a movie with my boyfriend, an indie film called 'Conception.' And it's kind of like an R-rated version of 'Valentine's Day.' So it's like all about eight couples, and me and my boyfriend play one of them together. And that was a lot of fun.
Sarah Hyland
#27. It doesn't get any more underground, conscious or indie than Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, but because they got a couple of really big pop hits, actually some of the biggest pop hits that hip-hop has ever seen, people are missing that part of their story. People are not counting that blessing.
Talib Kweli
#28. During the '90s, a lot of us in the indie film world were not making our money off our movies. We were screenwriters doing scripts for hire for studios.
Allison Anders
#29. When I was young, we didn't have indie games. We had 'garage developers' or similar terms, who were just small teams making games out of passion.
Markus Persson
#30. Independent film is such a huge deal in the UK. There aren't many big budget studio movies that get greenlit at all. The indie film industy is a great opportunity that I'm trying to seize.
Aml Ameen
#31. Even though I wasn't sure I could make it as an indie, almost immediately I felt as if a weight had been lifted off me. To be as independent as I am and to be able to support myself is incredibly satisfying. Everything I want to do myself, I can.
Emma Holly
#32. I've got friends who are literally working alone on indie games that have no prospect of profit or commercial success. I've got guys working on iPhone games.
Warren Spector
#33. You really think all of those indie music dorks go to SXSW every year to check out music? They go there to wear their laminates and act important and try to get laid.
Mark Kozelek
#34. It is hard to come up with ideas that are achievable on a scale that you know you are going to have for an indie film but it also have some kind of hook.
Jake Schreier
#35. My indie work is mostly reality-based, focused on real life and characters.
Jeff Lemire
#36. I'm excited that 'The Good Guy' is getting distribution because indie movies they're not - people ran out of money and they're not making these movies anymore. It's all superhero movies or real obvious tent pole studio films.
Bryan Greenberg
#37. I was the female lead in a romantic comedy. It's a little indie film that we shot in China called 'America Town,' starring Daniel Henney and Bill Paxton. I actually had to speak Chinese in the film. It was funny because I found out I was doing the film and then a week later, I was in Shanghai.
Eliza Coupe
#38. Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.
Jeff Daniels
#39. I do sort of gravitate towards smaller, indie-type movies.
Kristen Wiig
#40. I will never sign to a major record label again. If, by some mega fluke, a record of mine looked like it might break big, I'd try and do it via an indie or somehow license it. I'm not having my music owned by those corporate bastards again.
Malcolm Wilson
#41. I had received some minor indie label interest when I was 14 after I was in a schools music competition thing in NZ called 'Rockquest', but I knew it wasn't the right time and that I wasn't good enough and needed to concentrate on school.
Brooke Fraser
#42. Books have a publishing standard, and every Indie Author is responsible to their readers in making sure those standards are met or exceeded.
Eeva Lancaster
#43. I was trained at classical piano as a youngster back in PA. To rebel, I bought a drum set and played in some rock & roll bands. In college I picked up a guitar and became obsessed with practicing which led to playing guitar in indie rock bands in the mid 90's. Which led me to Los Angeles.
Jeff Cardoni
#45. I think indie films have more of a fresh, experimental vibe about them, whereas studio films know what they want and can basically get it.
Kodi Smit-McPhee
#46. It could have been different," I say, almost under my breath. If I'd kissed Indie again after she kissed me. If I hadn't known Cassia before I met Indie.
"But it's not," Indie says, and she's right.
Ally Condie
#47. I really hope people go out and support the indie filmmakers, because it's a dying breed and there's a lot of cool voices out there that need to be heard.
Bryan Greenberg
#48. Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.
Jess Row
#49. Sometimes I want to do something that's really funny and other times I read an indie script that is going to be made for nothing but I want to do it because I think that I can connect with something in the story.
Brittany Snow
#50. I like the glamorous indie rock look, like The Libertines. But you know, without the heroin needle sticking out of my arm.
Ed Westwick
#51. It's so funny because the roles that I've been offered in the indie film world have been similar to each other, and the roles that I've been offered in the TV world have been similar to each other, but the TV roles and the indie film roles have been completely different.
Courtney Ford
#52. The pirating thing is bad. The people it hurts the most are the ones you least think it hurts. It's not the big Britney Spears albums that are being pirated; it's the indie bands that don't have two cents to their name.
Rob Zombie
#53. I retired from acting the same time they stopped hiring me. But following my own thing of making these small indie movies has been the happiest I've ever been.
Bobcat Goldthwait
#54. You gain and lose different things in different mediums or different sectors of different mediums. There are liberties you get on tiny indie films in terms of not having to be designed toward a marketing demographic.
Anna Paquin
#55. I like the idea of not having to do stuff for the money, and if I want to, I can pick indie projects for the rest of my life and be quite happy doing that.
Daniel Radcliffe
#56. I don't want to be 'box-office girl,' but I don't want to be 'that indie girl' either.
Kirsten Dunst
#57. I'm on a weird quest to be sort of famous, like an indie movie star that only the hip people like to chat about.....I want to be underground famous," she wrote on Grrl, before working on her Sith promotions - she's genuinely on "our side.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
#58. What I have appreciated about the 'Call of Duty' games is the scale of production. It's not an indie game. It's not trying to be an indie game. But I've genuinely been pretty consistently blown away by, wow, what an effort has gone into this.
Trent Reznor
#59. Clothes are like a suit of armour when you're young. I was quite a shy teen, so I wanted to make aggressive statements with the way I looked. I'd say my goth/indie stage was the worst: there was a lot of experimentation involving pink food dye in my fringe.
Erin O'Connor
#60. When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like. They called it a new type of something; they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting.
FKA Twigs
#61. I've had the opportunity to work on some really great indie features. One of them being 'Little Savages,' which is a super fun family film.
Katherine McNamara
#62. The second 'Postal Service' album is threatening to become the 'Chinese Democracy' of indie rock. It will come out eventually, or maybe it won't.
Ben Gibbard
#63. The good thing about the studio is that, when the movie comes out, they will put their marketing and their money behind it, which isn't necessarily true with indie movies, just by the nature of it being an independent film.
Jamie Linden
#64. If you look at 'Avatar,' could you imagine if you did 'Avatar' for 50 million dollars? It would be ridiculous! You would almost be getting laughs from the audience, unless you got a real indie director to do something incredibly stylised.
Adam McKay
#65. When I was a kid, you listened to a certain genre. Now it's like, "I love indie rock, I love hip-hop, jazz, funk." Also, we knew it couldn't be the same thing each year.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers
#66. Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, 'Several Shades of Why' and 'Heavy Blanket,' J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that '80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.
Henry Rollins
#67. When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood.
Hedi Slimane
#68. A part of me is a liberal New Yorker involved in politics and certain attitudes about movies. I kind of lost my indie credibility over 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith.' I know I haven't lost it. I just have to go make an independent movie. I just have to do it. Just for me.
Doug Liman
#69. From what I hear, everyone who does a Marvel movie gets a three-picture deal. I'll be Sam Jackson's stand-in. I'll do eight pictures for Marvel, and then I'll just do indies. Marvel can pay for my indie career.
Sinqua Walls
#70. Something happened in the nineties. There was a shift. I don't want to blame it on grunge or the rise of indie - but that was basically it. It was seen as dirty and kind of ignorant to have these ambitions, to want to be a big band.
Brandon Flowers
#71. I started in the theater world in New York City - and indie films - and I love the feeling of your head coming together and trying to tell a simple story, a small story, and just getting that vibe of storytelling without all the craziness of big budget.
Andre Royo
#72. It gets super dark. I did a bunch of intense indie movies when I was starting out in my career and I was always in a bad mood because, when you're dealing with the subject matter of losing your baby, getting raped and all that stuff, it's not fun to go through. You really have to go there.
Busy Philipps
#73. I've done a lot of very low-budget indie films, so it was just really exciting and fun to be doing a film where there's a lot more time and these huge, vast sets. I was like a kid in a playground. It was amazing!
Felicity Jones
#74. On MySpace ... the whole demographic of the stand-up comedy fan has changed. It's like an indie band thing. People think they've discovered you.
Jim Gaffigan
#75. We all like indie directors - heck, I even married one ... but we're divorced now.
Rosie Perez
#76. I have so many indie bands on my iPod. What I don't really understand is the attitude that if a band is unknown, they're good, and if they get fans, then you move on to the next band.
Taylor Swift
#77. Indie authors write, design, sell. Like magic, skip one and you make must read vanish.
Temple Emmet Williams
#78. For me, I always have looked at 'indie' as a term of 'independence.' Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant 'popular' to me; you know, it didn't define a sound.
Solange Knowles
#79. I'm not so interested in being indie just for the sake of being indie.
Lykke Li
#80. We grew up listening to alternative music from the '90s, and there was no shame in being on a major label and still making the music you wanted to make. I feel like rap rock came around and drew a line in the sand, and everybody that was like me ran away from that and started making indie-rock.
Nate Ruess
#81. I used to be really influenced by Brian Bendis, back in his indie days. But I guess I try to tone that down.
Bryan Lee O'Malley
#82. What's cool about indie rock is that one band can do effectively the same thing as another band, and one band nails it, and the other one doesn't. I like that elusiveness.
Andrew Bird
#83. They praise these tiny indie bands, but if a band finally gets mainstream success, the same people who praised them attack them for 'selling out.' People often play at being nonconformists to mask their own feelings of not fitting in.
Kyle Baker
#84. I was kind of going that route with my country music. Indie country. Which would work, if I was playing on Americana stages. Unless I had a television outlet like 'Glee'.
Laura Bell Bundy
#85. I was still doing the punk thing, but also playing in some indie bands, I had a less crazy hairstyle.
Tony Palermo
#86. I think people are enticed by indie rap and every time you have a group going against the grain, they're gonna be like, 'Wow, you did it yourself in 2012, that's impressive - how did you do it? What're you doing that's different? And how can I be a part of it?'
Macklemore
#87. Indie world won't have me, and mainstream world treats me like an alien, but here I am still floating between these two worlds.
Billy Corgan
#88. I've always found that whatever you say about indie rock, it is the most inclusive genre or title for anything. It doesn't pin you down too much, like other labels would. It's just newer, it has less baggage. I'm happy to be in that category.
Andrew Bird
#89. Normally, I think the people you would use on your first film, it would be a real struggle to bring them with you onto your television show. I just brought every single person with and expanded my little indie film world.
Jill Soloway
#90. I'm taking the indie filmmaker's approach to building my career and that approach is developing a relationship with the fans.
Romany Malco
#91. Novels are read
Or their authors are blue.
Support Indie writers:
Buy their books, post reviews!
Cheri Gillard
#92. They said I was a married mother of two but the record sounded like an indie album and they didn't know how to market it! This country is incredibly sexist, as is the music and media industry.
Siobhan Fahey
#93. What can we expect from this latest crop of indie directors who have been sucked into the franchise factory? I'm especially curious about 'Star Wars,' which will feature an all-indie crew after J. J. Abrams finishes with 'Episode VII.'
Annalee Newitz
#94. I had seen other comic friends of mine go to indie labels. Like David Cross and Pat Oswald went to Subpop, and Subpop didn't make total sense for me, but the metal version of that did. So I made a small list with Metal Blade, Prosthetic and couple of other labels, and Relapse was one of them.
Brian Posehn
#95. I was never really a child actor. I was working sporadically in indie films in Pennsylvania, but I was still living at home.
Charlie McDermott
#96. I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative. So whatever. I listen to all if it. Classic rock and classic pop, all of that.
John Legend
#97. Film schools are now nearly 50-50 male-female, and women are also well represented at festivals and in indie film. But what happens to them after they direct their first film or short? Where do they go? They certainly aren't being given the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
Lesli Linka Glatter
#98. Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.
Thomas Lennon
#99. That's my advice for indie filmmakers: Marry a supermodel.
Edward Burns
#100. If you want to succeed in indie publishing, be prepared to work your ass off and demonstrate patience. Writers who aren't willing to do those two things will fail. Period.
Sean Platt
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