We’ve collected the best Indie Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Andrew Bird, Parker Posey, Lykke Li, Christina Milian, Thomas Ian Nicholas. Use them as an inspiration.
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I’m an indie artist with major distribution, so one foot in the extreme major music business and one foot in the abyss of indie artists.
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I hope people describe my music as lyrically driven, cross genre. Kind of alternative, kind of indie, kind of rap, kind of everything.
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I would love to do anything from a really gritty, interesting, indie type film, to that commercial, bigger stuff.
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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.
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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.
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Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don’t really see the value in it… humanizing tricky characters is exhilarating, and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me.
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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?’
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If I have a male protagonist, it’s a studio movie, and if it’s a female protagonist, it’s an indie movie. That’s just how it is. It’s not about the studios. It’s about America and who goes to see movies. Women are interested in men and women, and men aren’t interested in the woman‘s story. They just aren’t.
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I learned piano off YouTube and still do a lot. It’s hard to find contemporary indie music on there, at least lessons, because the reach is smaller. I did it so people like me out there could learn my songs if they wanted to and maybe, in a small way, to pay forward all the free lessons I’ve had over the years.
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It’s not like I set out to be ‘the indie guy.’
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‘Twelve‘ was a total indie drama character piece. It wasn’t that it was more about the performance, but it was just a very different thing where, with horror, there’s this whole added element of the visual and the technical and the choreography.
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The indie shows are tons of fun. And for the fans, having that up close and personal experience is so different to watching wrestling on television at home.
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We’re not going to do any titles in Bloodsport. That’s really just for a very very very simple reason and that is because as an indie wrestling promotion, there is no guarantee that we can ensure that we can have return on talent. If someone gets picked up, there’s nothing we can do to make sure we keep them.
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Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that most of the good horror films made in the U.S. are indie films. You might get ‘The Ring’ or ‘The Others,’ but most are independently produced.
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‘Five Easy Pieces,’ ‘Easy Rider‘ – those are indie pictures; those were not studio pictures. They had relationships with studio distribution, but they were indies.
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Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.
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I love to watch low-budget indie artsy films, but I do also love the big blockbuster things. I would love to do that one day, do a Marvel film. That would be really great.
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I had the most frustrating thing happen when I was trying to find a label. I sent my album to this indie label, and they were like, ‘We already have two girls on the label. I’m so sorry, we just can’t take your project.’
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I did a short film called ‘Disco’ and won an award for Best Supporting Actor at an indie film festival, and that was nice. Hopefully there’s lots more to come.
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The Weeknd’s ‘Can’t Feel My Face‘ is very experimental. It’s pop meets urban meets indie meets alternative.
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I’ve always been indie.
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I don’t understand indie films. So, I won’t do such films.
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Ultimately it’s just music – whether I’m catering to the Bollywood audience or the indie audience. I just approach every type of music the way I am, and how my personality is.
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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.
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A lot of people of color in the music industry are still more interested in embracing things that are considered white canon, and looking radical. Like when people point to punk in the indie world: If you point to the history of punk as what you see as your legacy, that’s more prized and praised.
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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.
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In Providence, we didn’t have a first-run movie theater. But we did have an indie movie theatre on the Brown campus. That was the theater we’d go to. I think, as highbrow as it sounds, that I grew up on the films.
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It’s a lot of work being an indie artist, but it’s worth it.
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The word ‘indie’ is meaningless now. It’s so over-used that people think it simply means green hair.
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You get dinged for wanting to do a comedy, then wanting to do a big-budget action film, and then wanting to do an indie. But you can’t let other people trying to label you get in the way of trying to do something artistically.
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Look: You’re not gonna become a millionaire doing this, but that was never the point. And I think a lot of people in the indie film business kind of took their eye off of that.
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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.
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Indie film isn’t dead, it just grew up.
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I want to balance my projects. Ideally, I’d like to do at least one indie film, a mainstream movie, and a TV series in a year – the best of both worlds.
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Post COVID-19, there will be a rise in the number of people only listening to songs. The rise in audio consumption is great for indie artistes, including me, because those who are unable to afford a music video, but have a great song, will benefit from this.
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I feel like I’m a rock artist. I don’t feel like I’m a pop artist. And I’m alt rock. I’m indie rock. I’m punk rock. Because it comes from the pots and pans. It’s a lot of me, but I’ve got multiple personalities.
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I try to create a style that reflects my music. So I would say it’s definitely got some ’90s elements, some pop elements that are a bit more feminine, and then more indie, androdgynous elements.
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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.
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The first wrestling event I ever went to was PCW Ultra in L.A., and it was insane. They had RVD wrestling, Shane Strickland, Penta, and all these incredible indie wrestlers.
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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.
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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.
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There can be a wrong time – it’s happened to countless bands where they release their first record on a major label and never learned what they maybe should have learned on an indie.
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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.
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I used to be a part-time enthusiast press games writer when I was starting to get into making indie games.
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I criticized the whole American songwriting industry and the pop side of it and I was bitter about it. And I stepped back and thought ‘Why are you bitter? You can’t just stand there like every other indie musician and criticize this so-called ‘generic‘ music when you’re not doing anything to challenge that.’
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Just because I run an indie label doesn’t mean I don’t think Jay-Z is nice.
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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.
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I don’t know if i have a ‘take’ on L.A. The music community is enormous, from the studio musicians to the bands trying to ‘make it’ to the indie bands… so many bands… it can be overwhelming. But it seems healthy.
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I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in ‘Adventure Comics’ years ago starring The Atom. That’s the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.
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We have a lot of indie artists coming from Sweden, not so much soul. The closest thing we had was Robyn when she came out, but it’s a different kind of R&B.
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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.
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You are at the mercies of the dailies. With an indie you don’t have that.
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I’m into a lot of different types of music – pretty much everything from blue grass to jazz to dub step to metal to indie experimental and progressive.
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It’s a long process transitioning from indie to mainstream, and it’s not that easy because it’s a different environment when you are in the indie industry.
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I had an indie pop phase, I had just about every phase you could think of.
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I actually didn’t think I was going to do TV because I don’t really watch TV. I’m a little bit pretentious, and I do these little indie movies, so I envisioned that more as the path for myself.
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So many of the indie movies that get made are not about topics that touch millions and millions of people.
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To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe… it just doesn’t happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion.
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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.
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If you’re a fan of Indie wrestling at all, you can go back to, I think, 2007-2008, and you can see me wrestle CHIKARA. And you can see me wrestle in a tank top, and you can see me wrestle in a tank top that doesn’t look like the one I have in WWE. But it’s the same one.
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My dad would play ‘The Blue Album’ a lot, the first Weezer album, and that influenced my alternative indie thing and that’s kind of how I found tons and most of my favorite bands.
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I would love to dive into an indie film based on the streets of East Los Angeles where I grew up. If that doesn’t come my way soon, I think I just might have to write it myself.
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When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst.
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As more people get into indie bands and alternative music, they’re also getting more into other genres that fit those categories, like jazz and classical. It’s becoming more rebellious to go to a classical concert. You’re getting the younger art house crowd and regular students as well as those who are just curious.
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If you’re on an indie label, you’re not getting enough money. And if you’re on a major, you’re not getting enough support.
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You want every film that you make to do well, not just indie films in general.
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A lot of the music I listen to is indie rock. It’s not on the radio.
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Ultimately, if you act in mainstream movies, more people will come and watch your indie movies. That’s how you reach the audience.
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I have immense respect for Unity because they played a key role in establishing this indie revolution, empowering a huge number of people to get into game development.
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I do not differentiate between a commercial and an indie project as long as there is a strong subject and the character in the script is relatable.
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If you’re trying to solve a problem that is fundamentally important to human society, that’s really important to our mission at Indie Bio.
