Leontyne Price Quotes

I really wish people - maybe it's naive - wish people had priorities and were willing to be artistic patrons.

All the arts are predominantly national, and therefore the Australian Film Commission should be funding us. The battle gets more and more vicious each year.

Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?

We have to support our local artists. It's just that simple. Otherwise, we will have no art.

Advertising has always been a huge unrecognised source of outdoor relief for the arts.

My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.

Mr. Chairman, obviously a $60 million cut in the National Endowment for the Arts would be a disaster.

Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation.

I wish that the arts were better supported, and you can't say that enough times, but I also believe that whatever happens, artists will keep going.

Lillian Gish thought that there should be a cabinet position for the arts and I think she was right. I think she was right.

The arts are usually the first thing to be cut in schools or regional programs.

In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it.

The arts need funding.

I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.

If there's ever a moment when I am an Anglophile, it's when I see so many theatres in this country that have what I would call federal funding.

We can become very short-sighted in terms of objectives. The first thing to go during times of economic crisis and budget cuts is funding for things that are essential and not-quantifiable, like the arts. Save Big Bird

We have devoted ourselves to the government and extension of the Church, and, among other objects, we have conceived it to be our duty to foster especially literature and the fine arts ... next to knowledge and true worship of the Creator, nothing is better or more useful to mankind than such studies.

I think the arts should get big support, but my country has a lot of needs more important than film. Medication, education, food... The poverty is overwhelming. There are simply more important things to be attended to.

Despite all the taxes people pay, there supposedly isn't any money in this country for art. Of course, this makes an artist ask himself: "Well, then, what are you doing with the 100 million I pay each year? What happened to that money?" And he doesn't get an answer.

The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

Individual and corporate support is vital to building on London's leadership in the arts, and I hope others will join me in wanting to build on the National's role at the heart of modern theatre and sustaining it long into the future.

But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome.

It's a false proposition that we have to take the arts away to fund something else.

When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I'd like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.