Mark Morris Quotes

If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

There are aspects of '24' where I love its politics and aspects where I hate them.

We go see theater, we take in art, because it makes us feel.

I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.

You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.

I don't really go into labels or an in-depth discussion of different value systems because for me, it's sort of the truth of the situation in D.C. Certainly, in my fictional depiction of it, there are decent, shameless people on both sides at every level.

I love to get to the underbelly of why people are up in arms about anything. Really, what I see is a big shadow in the West, in America especially, and everyone's afraid of looking stupid. But the truth is, I'm a genius and I'm stupid at the same time.

I love films. I love music. I love poetry and stories. All of that I feel... I sort of get very excited and fed by.

Polanski is a great example of a person whose personal life clearly has been just fraught with scandal and transgression and criminal acts. And yet, in 'Rosemary's Baby,' I think he's made one of the crowning feminist statements in film.

I'm constantly not on the right side of history. I sympathize with the soldiers in the enemy's camp. For example in WWII, we know the Nazis and the Japanese were wrong. But I sympathize with the individual story of a soldier who was drafted into that.

Somebody - and I'm going to guess it was Hitchcock - once said that everyone has their reasons. If you remember that, as a writer, you'll write better than average villains.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

I believe in the Italy of municipalities, of the Renaissance, not in Mussolini's centralization.

Conservative voters will put up with a lot of things in the culture that disagree with their views. They have proven time and again they will roll their eyes at actors and musicians saying negative things about the presidents and candidates they vote for and still consume their product.

I request the audience to not mix cinema with politics.

I really don't understand because I love opera, because I respect the Michelangelos and da Vincis, that it should be shocking because I am a wrestler. Because I am a wrestler does it mean that I am some kind of a robot who only knows to go into the squared circle and pound on somebody?

I think, something that you might be able to locate in the work that I'm creating today: the ability to look at a black America as something that not only can be mined in a very sort of cynical, cold way, but also embraced in a very personal, love-driven way; but also sort of critiqued.

Though justice be thy plea consider this, that in the course of justice none of us should see salvation.

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not.

We must stop chasing dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature, and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.

A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites-God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.

Renoir had not only a great interest in human character, in human feeling, but had also a great love for the people he painted.