Oscar Wilde Quotes

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.

I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government.

I will never be a fan of any kind of political correctness: I think it's instant death to creativity.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Art penetrates, no matter how many bans you put out.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

I was told when I was little I couldn't have an opinion because you want everyone to buy your record and like you.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

In my estimation, the only thing that is more to be guarded against than bad taste is good taste.

Loopy as the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system is, it's better than what you'd probably get by putting such decisions in the federal government hands.

Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Anything that exists on the human palette is, from my point of view, fair game for artists to portray. You don't have to go see it if you don't want to, so don't go.

Pretty much anybody who does creative work in China navigates the gray zone. People aren't clear about where the line is any more, beyond which life gets really nasty and you become a dissident without having intended ever to be one.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.