Jesse Helms Quotes

People look to 'Dear White People' as an encyclopedia of our culture. But it's also art, and there are characters with different perspectives.

Theatre can be so patronising. So often, it's just proselytising for the theatre.

I'm a huge Spike Lee fan. I saw 'Do The Right Thing' twice in the same night when it first came out and had long conversations with all my friends about the issues in it.

Let's face it: pop music in its myriad permutations will always be sexually presumptuous, racially controversial and, frequently, politically charged.

The thing about '48 Hrs.' that really isn't thought about much is that's the first film where the black and the white criticize each other.

The role of art in society differs for every artist.

The role of art in society is not to resolve conflicts; rather, it is to express these conflicts and antagonisms.

Any time you have people of different races in a movie that's about America, there's going to be a racial component.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

We[with Jordan Peele] wanted to do something with [Barack] Obama because we actually felt that Obama was kind of responsible for us even getting a show in the first place because there's this biracial person who might, you know, have to ride the divide between two different races.

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

'Get Out' takes on the task of exploring race in America, something that hasn't really been done within the genre since 'Night of the Living Dead' 47 years ago.

The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

I suggested that it was not enough to add a moustache to the Mona Lisa: it should simply be destroyed.

You see all races in music, and in dance and theatre, so why can't we see it in fashion?

The only good copies are those which make us see the absurdity of bad originals.

This is why integration will not work. It assumes that the two races, black and white, are equal and can be made to live as one. This is not true.

What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

I believe the man who will go down in posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of everyday life around him.

Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music.

There are artists with palettes and easels selling the kind of modern art that Soviet art critics used to critique with bulldozers. Judging by the paintings I saw, the Soviets were right the first time.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.