Peter Saul Quotes

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

With Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young... we're very strong individuals, and we want our lives to be led the way we want them to.

Once people sense their own power, no authoritarian government can stand against the people who are determined to be free.

Right before I got 'Sons of Anarchy,' I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn't read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.

When I act, I feel like I am a color in someone else's painting - I can be the best blue that there is, but I'm still only part of their entire picture - but, with music, when I am performing with Reserved For Rondee, I am the painter, you know?

A Study In Utopia and Dictatorship

I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program ... and not for any other reason than that there is no political program -- any more than there is a theory of tragedy -- which can encompass the complexities of real life.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.”

I've always felt like I've had the ability to choose which roles I was going to play. I don't think that the industry agreed with me, but I've always had a bit of a headstrong attitude of only doing the things that I really believe in and want to explore.

All the artists out there, I ask you and beg you: Take over your ship. It's your career. It's your life.

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

Actors are very often people who are placed in a position where they think they have to be grateful for the job and have no control over what they play and how they play it. I was not taught that way. I completely disagree with that. I think that you have more control than you think.

I've been wanting to produce for some time because I want to have more creative control over the things that I do and not be victim to the whims of other people's desires.

As a political artist, I think you have to learn how to create art, no matter what your ideology is.

I don't suffer the decisions the studio world makes.

I love having the control over the end result and not having to go through some committee to get something approved. I feel sorry for people, like actors, because unless you're Woody Allen or Mel Gibson, they don't have much say in the decisions that affect their work.

I did not necessarily feel that Hollywood was interested in what I wanted to do. They wanted me to do what they wanted to do.

I don't know everybody's political opinions, but I think the majority of people in the arts are pretty leftist, and we're disappointed in the Trump administration.

After I got back my career and my artistic freedom in 1982, my golden rule is the music must never suffer.

Definitely, doing my solo stuff, it's fun in a different way. I get a lot more say. However, there's a lot more work to do because I have to make everything happen.

Now I know that however big a film, you have every right over how you want to be seen on screen.

No one is mediating aesthetic choices on an OPN album other than myself.

I'm not here to put my music out on the Internet with no support and then say I got creative freedom. I've got creative freedom wherever I go: I don't create anything that I don't want to create. That's freedom. Since when does a company force you to make something that you don't want to make? If they do that, you leave.

I always say I want creative control. A lot of people don't think about that. And that's what every artist should think of - being creative and not just a puppet.

I can only control what I can, which is what I'm able to do as an artist.