Tom Folsom Quotes

Me, it was always about being able to bounce around to where I wanna be. Like, with 'Arular,' people always say it's so political, but I think 50 per cent of the album is not very political at all. It's just really a shouty, shouty girl thing.

The Oscars are about the dynamics of that moment, of that season. It reflects what's been going on in the world every year through the movies. And a lot of times, what's popular at the movies is popular because of what's going on in the world at that moment.

The Internet doesn't always play a great role for art, especially art in the street, as people take what they see for the final image of it. But the most interesting thing about street art is to see it for real, to understand what it means and where it's displayed.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

For me, graffiti and the complexities with which it is either absorbed or expelled from what is going on, is a really good comparison to the way I see my work being similarly expelled or absorbed into different types of discourse.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

What I do believe is theatre is a medium with a peculiar ability to air vital issues.

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

Popular sings are the only art form that describes the temper of the times.

The day Obama got into office, rap was less important because Obama gave kids an alternative. But will rap ever go away? No. There will always be a need for poets.

'Skins' has been such a great thing for our generation - I don't want it to become a parody of itself.

One of the greatest things about the theatre is how it can completely change the way you see the world around you. 'Dear Evan Hansen' did this for me.

When the punk rock thing happened, I thought, 'Right, I have one chance here to be seen as part of some wider social phenomenon.'

We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture - by art, if we're lucky. And it's amazing how often people have lost sight of this.

I believe that art can make relevant and progressive contributions to culture and society.

Thinking about the artists I've loved through the years, my favorites are the ones who've made music with cultural, societal and political significance.

I want to do what Kid Cudi did for kids for my generation.

I would hope to make a record that interacts with culture in a macro sense. That is something to aspire to.

Art can contextualise and buttress fame. So rather than being antagonistic in the way Fugazi would have had it in 1989, particularly in the present, maybe they are one - they belong to one another.

[Rock 'n' roll] is still a primitive form and there's no way you can get away from that. It's one of the primitive art forms and that's why it's good and that's why it's lasted...you know, it hasn't become sophisticated and it's not in the opera house.

Art informs life in so many ways, and vice versa.