Top 15 Nina Paley Quotes

When you shut down neurons to prevent them from transmitting signals, we call that "brain damage." Copyright is brain damage. It's brain damage in the great mind, and it's brain damage in the individual mind.

I am not a copyright reformer. I am a copyright abolitionist.

Mimi: Silencing you because I don’t like what you say is censorship. Silencing you because I can make more money that way is copyright. They’re totally different! Eunice: The profit motive makes it OK.

Mimi: I like you! Eunice: So what? You like everyone. I want assholes to like me — that’ll mean I’m really special!

Mimi: Copyright’s all about balance: balancing creators’ and the public’s need for free expression… Eunice: with copyright lawyers’ need for paychecks!

Pronounced “me-me and you-ness.” Mimi has pointy ears and Eunice has floppy ears

Everyone wants me to make another movie and I'm like "Yeah, I'm doing quilts." Yeah, I have ideas. I have to be really, really obsessively moved. Like I have to have no other choice to do a project that takes that much time and it has to be a motivation other than just that I know that I will get approval for it. Much as I love approval, I mean it's extremely tempting. I want it. And I have a lot of doubts about following my muse when my muse leads me down some weird path. Again, like quilts. But I also know that if I do something just because I know people will approve of that, that's not really going to help me as an artist. So I'm not ruling out doing another film, but I'm only going to do it if I have no other choice, which was the case with Sita Sings the Blues.

My grand total for the free film was $132,000, and that is a business model I am totally sticking to. And everything that I do now is totally free.

Audiences want to support artists. Which is pretty much how it's always been except during the last 100 years where it's turned into this really vicious, cutthroat, nasty business with all these blood-thirsty, parasitic middle-men. But historically, artists were relatively poor and supported directly by their audiences. There's a great book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde. You know, art is a gift and it turns out the audience is happy to give back.

Because I didn't sell it to a distributor, it can be in lots of film festivals. It's been in, I think, at least 200 festivals, it's won more than 35 awards which is great. I like that! If I had gone with a distributor they would have immediately said no to film festivals which I do not understand why distributors do, but that's what they do.

Total box office so far has been $22,350 … that trickles down to $3,000 for me. Which really isn't much, but it's fine. People are seeing the film and they're seeing it the the way it should be seen. I do not feel like the distributors are ripping me off. I feel like this is the model of film distribution and this is the reality of it and fortunately my income is not dependent on it.

I don't think distributors are cheating or evil or anything like that, I just think that the business model is unsustainable so they truly don't have money. There's just not much money in this particular model.

I love money! Just because it's free doesn't mean I don't like money. And actually I've made more money this way than any distributor said I could possibly make, which isn't much because independent distributors are notoriously without money. So the most money any distributor told me I could possibly hope to make on this film, total, maximum, in my wildest dreams was $50,000, and they said much more realistic would be $10,000 or $25,000 and the biggest advance I was offered, I think, was $20,000 and that's for locking up all the rights.

Our idea, which art in the ether, that cannot be named: Thy vision come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is an abstraction. Give us this day our daily spark and forgive our criticisms, as we forgive those who critique against us. And lead us not into stagnation, but deliver us from ego, for thine is the vision, the power and the glory forever. Amen.

In ten years I think the [copyright] laws are going to be worse and I also think they are going to be less relevant. I mean, already the difference between the laws and people's behaviour, It's like they're different planets. I'm not hopeful for the laws changing. A lot of other people are, so maybe we will have meaningful copyright reform. I doubt it. I don't think it matters. I think the tools are available for people to create and share culture and they're going to do that and they might be doing it illegaly and at a certain point it's going to be more than the system can handle. I will say that if the power structure as it exists wants to continue they're going to have to reform because it's not sustainable. Copyright law as it is, it's just completely out of touch with human behaviour.