Ken Loach Quotes

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

As soon as I found out how compartmentalized the industry was, I realized, Well, no wonder the cartoons are so bad.

I think that designers have an incredibly broad creative repertoire. They solve. They create images of perfection for any number of clients. I could never do that. I'm my client. That's the difference between an artist and a designer; it's a client relationship.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

A lot of big whoever producers, they come with a song and they say, 'Sing this,' and I'm not that girl.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

From the moment I got to Hollywood, I've always felt like I never really got to do what I wanted to do. In general, artists feel that you're never really allowed to accomplish what you would like to accomplish because there's just so much of this system that gets in the way; the business gets in the way of the art.

There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things.

I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.

There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

What happens with artists, or people who start off doing things for the right reasons, is that you slowly start to paint yourself into a corner by doing what people outside of the creative world are asking you to do, and I think that's antithetical to being an artist.

The second you feel a political imperative, it destroys your art.

I must say here in France I had more serenity or security as I was working because I knew I was making the film the way I wished and that the film would be seen, ultimately, which is not always the case in Iran. In Iran, you always work having in mind this worry of will I be able to carry on my project as I wish and will the audience see the film.

When you start out as a TV writer, you get a lot of pressure from outside forces to fit into what they think people want.

Honestly, I really can't speak on others, but in a sense, I feel like every artist always has their problems with the industry because we all want to have our creative way.

The problem with my peers is they don't understand television. You have to work within the confines of what executives will allow you to put on TV. Otherwise, we've not done anything, we've not really struggled to change the culture at all.

In America, I don't think you have the creative freedom that I'm used to. Traditionally, it's a producer's cinema here.

Self-censorship is the most devastating thing for an artist.