Douglas Carter Beane Quotes

Creative freedom on television is very limited and I get bored very easily.

I do think the audiences have a right to judge what they feel is offensive and not.

My lyrics aren't offensive. Some people find everything offensive.

There are things I'm doing with 'The After' that would've never flown on 'The X-Files' and on network television, so it's more permissive. That's not to say that you want to abuse that. I think that a show like 'The X-Files' actually worked better as a network show with the restraints put on it, the censorship that was applied.

Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.

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!'

Cable had a latitude to move which created less censorship and bestowed upon the artists, the writers and the creators, more liberty to create their shows.

Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.

Coming from The Disney Channel, anything I do is going to offend somehow, somewhere, somehow.

Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.

They'll say, That's funny, but you can't do that on TV.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

It just worries me that if we start trying to erase history that we can learn from, where does that end? Do you start taking away books people find offensive? It's just a path that seems very dangerous to me in this country.

People ask could I have written the show I wrote in 1990 now, and I don't think I could. I think it's much easier to offend people nowadays. People have grown quite sensitive, I think.

In polite society, there is such a thing as sensitivity to some issues, as time has gone on. There was a time when we weren't politically correct, at all, and we all wince at moments when we look to the past and see that. I don't really know what the answer is, as far as that is concerned. However, me, as an artist, I don't really think about it, at all. It actually is not my job to think about that, especially in terms of me, as a writer, but also as a filmmaker. I'm not worried about the filmmaking part because, if I'm writing it, that's what I'm going to do.

Several times I drew a critical cartoon and then, at the last moment, stopped myself from putting it out in print. I thought it would be misunderstood, be a politically incorrect thing to do.

Having been subjected to the pigeonholing of Hollywood myself, I realized that once you become a studio-approved director, your chances of ever making your own film again are zero. You make the films that the studio wants you to make.

To have art suppressed is very dangerous to society.

I could have never had any kind of creative freedom on TV, so then I did movies! Now, I am able to do all kinds of entertainment... and that, I feel, is the biggest blessing!

I think that, as a show creator, you have to be very careful about what messages you're putting out into the world. That is a not always popular thing to suggest, because it feels very Tipper Gore-y, perhaps.

I don't believe anything is truly off limits, but as a performer, one has to know that people might be offended, and there are consequences.

We do appreciate that we have a very conservative audience and we do try to walk the fine line of that and not offend anybody.

It is very difficult to make films like 'Madras Cafe' in India, given the diverse nature of the country.

I request the audience to not mix cinema with politics.