Artistic Restriction Quotes

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.

Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.

Much of left-wing artistic activity … has been restricted, narrowed … sometimes made sterile … [This flows] from a central source … That source is the vulgarization of the theory of art which lies behind left-wing thinking: namely, “art is a weapon.” I have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straightjacket.

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand.

I hate the idea of genres.

The idea of content in art is today merely a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

I'm not technically proficient enough to attempt all kinds of music.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

When one gets time duration, one becomes very restricted, and hence, creativity suffers.

When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part the poet in me.... If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom... I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project, it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

I hate that if you do one style of music or become really well known for that one song, that everything that comes after has to fit that mold.

In 1948 the first severe crash occurred in my life when Stalin put out his decree on 'formalism.' There was a bulletin board in the Moscow Conservatory. They posted the decree, which said Shostakovich's compositions and Prokofiev's were no longer to be played.

If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.

No actor has complete freedom.

Today, the scope for variety has shrunk drastically. There are only a handful of topnotch composers like A. R. Rahman, Anu Malik, Jatin-Lalit... that's it.

I've always been political but I don't like to bring it into my work any more because I think it limits me.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

I wasn't allowed to grow as an artist. My albums were nicer to look at than to listen to.

I knew that in Hollywood they tend to pigeonhole talent, and when you experience a little success in one genre, their instinct is to keep you in that box.

You have a great road map when you play somebody that exists. That's the amazing thing. But then you have great limitations from that road map. It's hard to deviate from it creatively as an actor. It's like, "Oh wait, he'd never do that."