Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Chow

"There’s no common taste in this world" lands like a shrug that’s also a dare. Coming from Stephen Chow, it reads less like a philosophical slogan and more like a survival tactic from someone who built a career on being misunderstood before being adored. Chow’s comedy is famously divisive across borders: mo lei tau humor depends on speed, slang, tonal whiplash, and a willingness to let the joke be stupid on purpose. If you don’t have the cultural key, it can look like noise. If you do, it’s precision chaos.

The line’s intent is practical: stop chasing a single audience fantasy. It’s also quietly defensive, the kind of sentence you reach for after being told your work is “too local” or “not refined.” Chow flips the insult into a principle. Taste isn’t a universal court; it’s a patchwork of in-groups, eras, and reference systems. The subtext is permission: your job isn’t to be broadly approved, it’s to be sharply felt by the people who can meet the work where it lives.

Context matters. Chow came up in Hong Kong’s hyper-competitive entertainment machine, where “what sells” changes by the week and the pressure to sand off specificity for export is constant. His global breakthrough (and the uneven reception of some earlier films abroad) exposed a harsh truth: mass appeal is often just familiarity plus marketing. By refusing the myth of common taste, Chow defends creative idiosyncrasy as strategy, not indulgence. The irony is that this refusal is exactly what made him widely loved.