Joe Dante Quotes

It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.

What I find most interesting in fashion is that it has to reflect our time. You have to witness your own moment.

If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

In comedy, looking back is more important than looking around at your contemporaries because they are too much influenced by the same time period as you are.

Those old enough to write their memoirs should not comment on contemporary issues.

History is an antidote to the hubris of the present.

If I make a film about now, the minute it was done, it wouldn't be about now; it'd be about then.

It's easier to make art for a society at a certain point in time with an understanding of what's going on.

I don't want to sing songs and write songs that need to have images behind them that are of a specific time. The times we live in today - I mean, there's a lot to work with. But I think that if I was my age in 1975 or 1985, I would have felt the same way because that's what I gravitate toward.

Paul Goodman was not ahead of his time but IN his time.

All history is contemporary history.

Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art another.

I see things about the present more clearly when I'm looking through the frame of the past: I think it's very hard to assess the present moment that we are in.

History is weirdly dismissed as not having anything to do with the present moment.

Satire doesn't effect change.

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

With 'Downsizing,' a lot of the discussion hasn't been about the film itself, but about cultural and political conversations happening outside of it. It's being digested in the context of the time.

For me, fashion succeeds when it says something about the times we live in.

There's this zeitgeist happening, and people are more open to 'Sorry to Bother You' being a hit with 'Get Out' being out there. But that zeitgeist is also happening because of the movements going back to Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Usually, film is years behind. It just so happens that, this time, everything is lining up.

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our tendency to see everything in the dark glass of our own era, with all its blind spots, motes, beams, and distortions.

I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.

The power that you have as a storyteller is to be able to tell stories that are at once entertaining but also never lose sight of what's going on in the real world.

It's extremely important that plays reflect contemporary times and should not just be about asking for social change without having any connect with the audience.

It's interesting how thrillers reflect the times we live in.