Chinua Achebe Quotes

As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f... dictionary.

I don't think it's an artist's responsibility to be political all the time. I think your first responsibility as an artist is to make music that people will listen to and enjoy. However, I think that when you are able to say something that is moving and put it in a great song, then that is even better.

I never try and send messages through my feature films; it's always naturally woven in and comes through on its own, as that's the way I think about society.

The challenge is to balance the technical elements and what is required of us with being artists and telling a story.

I was involved with the anti-apartheid movement through my work as an artist and also through my political commitment.

My point is that the great challenge of an artist is to balance those two things: to be strong enough to have your own personal vision that you will put on the page or the canvas or the screen, no matter what people say, but it requires a radical sensitivity. You have to be completely open to what the world is telling you, to what your audience tells you. And balancing those two things is nearly impossible.

The political is not compatible with the artistic, because the former, in order to prove, has to be one-sided.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

The artist must be blind to distinction between 'recognized' or 'unrecognized' conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age.

An artist should always bite the hand that feeds him - but not too hard.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

Generosity is a two-edged virtue for an artist - it nourishes his imagination but has a fatal effect on his routine.

Some people feel that it's controversial if I say that because my dad is known as a political artist. But I don't really believe that he was a political artist. I think some of his songs were political, and I think they were incredible because he was able to make art that was political and that wasn't pedantic. But I think he was unique in being able to do that.

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist and empathize with the human experience, unless you know your truth and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

I'm a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that's my cross to bear

The director’s task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.

If you are any kind of an artist, then validation . . . can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway.

We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.

The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists.

This is the thing: Art is more important than making a show, something that amuses people. Art is something that needs to give to the public, to the actors, to the artist - to give something that makes life the paradise it can be. Life can be a paradise. Still, I believe that. Even if there is Trump, there can be a paradise.