Max Eastman Quotes

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

I turned to historical films because they pass censors more easily.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

I want to be an artist, not... a celluloid aphrodisiac.

In any country, in any city, there will be political influence on what is said, what kind of images are to be projected and, yes, of course artists can be and are influenced by politicians.

I never knew I was an artist until I did 'Last of the Mohicans'.

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

I don't consider myself a musician. I'm an artist.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

Performance artists in a free society have the right to do the most extraordinary and bizarre things. That’s called ‘Freedom of Speech.’

Under Stalin, artists weren't dissidents; all they hoped was to survive and write.

Hollywood seduces a person who's used to making theater, art, and having success on their own terms and then tries to squish them into a box and, eventually, throws the box out.

The Soviet Union had only one party. You couldn't express yourself freely; you couldn't admit belief in God. And yet this terrible regime understood that human beings have to express themselves, through music, even at a bad level. All kids studied music automatically, just as they did maths or languages or sport.

To call yourself a Chinese artist or woman artist or African artist reflects a certain kind of condition. To me, that is not necessary.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions--all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

Sometimes I think I'm more comfortable onstage than I am in my own room. When I get onstage, it's kind of like your chance to let go and be something that you're not maybe. It's your time to dream.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

There is only one reason for art in America, and that is that the people of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time, and their own land.

Money is completely boring to me. It means nothing, except it feeds my art. Every penny I make goes back into the Haus of GaGa. My Haus of GaGa is something like Andy Warhol's Factory.

I had thrown my body in for art... I had thrown myself into this game for art. You know, I was not a very good artist. But this was, like, one thing I could do. (On being photographed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at Duchamp's 1963 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art.)

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

All political movements are basically anti-creative - since a political movement is a form of war. "There's no place for impractical dreamers around here," that's what they always say. "Your writing activities will be directed, kindly stop horsing around." "As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers." Both favor alcohol and are against pot.