Bonnie Raitt Quotes

As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn't pass that up when it comes your way.

A musicians or artists responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth.

As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

I have people who want to pull me into specific projects in the community based on my music and on the mixtapes. It's like, it's the truth but I'm not trying to preach to you. Because who am I to say what's really right or wrong, or whether what I say is going to change anything? I don't take it too seriously; it's really whimsical.

It's the artist's duty to have an artist's life, somehow to obtain time and freedom and then to muster the desire and discipline to make good work out of the life, whether that goodness is in the world's aesthetics, its radicalism, its candor, its singularity, or its universality.

What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

The idea that musicians/artists have a responsibility to be community leaders or "role models" is problematic to me because I really believe that some of the most exciting art is not community-minded at least in any obvious or direct way, which is not to say that it is not ethical or consciousness-changing.

We artists can only go so far as the people can follow us. We are not alone, we are part of the system. We can take risks, but if you want to go to the peak of your consciousness, you may very well find yourself alone. Even if you know how to translate what you see, maybe only ten people will be able to understand what you tell. But, if you have faith in your vision, and retell it again and again, you will start noticing that, after a time, more people will begin to catch up with you.

If this day means anything, it means that you are now in the contingent of the responsible. You must be kind, yes, but you must also look beyond your own house. We're depending on you for your efforts and your vision. We are depending on your eye and your imagination to identify what wrongs exist and persist, and on your hands, your backs, your efforts, to right them.

My responsibility as an artist is to turn up at the page or the piano or the microphone. The rest is up to God.

Simply according artistic works the same protection as nonartistic works may not be sufficient to protect creativity. After all, the very essence of artistic expression is invention and artists necessarily draw on their own experience. But if the rules of liability are unclear, artists will not be able to know how much disguise is sufficient to protect their claims from the claims of those who may see themselves in the portrayals.

We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, "Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?"

Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode.

Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

The [nonprofit] sector enhances our creativity, enlivens our communities, nurtures individual responsibility, stirs life at the grassroots, and reminds us that we were born free.

The artist as citizen is here to stay.

Be the artist you were born to be.

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

The nice thing about being on stage is it's not that I know what to do, but I have a very clear feeling that anything I do is OK. All I'm up there to do is express how I feel. Any way I choose to do that is fine.

I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.