Arts Funding Quotes

Fine arts education in public schools is really abysmal. The same emphasis should be put on music, theater, dance - anything creative - that's put on math and science.

I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.

Funding for sports (and the arts) are often the first things facing the chop in difficult times.

As President, I will end once and for all the use of taxpayer funds to promote the National Endowment for the Arts and other programs that subsidize amoral and degrading activities.

It was progressively more difficult to find work in the theatre, as well.

It's wrong to make a living off the theater. Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living - whether you're a writer or an actor or a director - in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love.

I'd like to work on putting art programs back in schools.

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

I'm hoping someday that we'll be able to start a consortium with places like Carnegie Hall to work on early childhood education. I really feel that's the most important place to put the arts.

Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country.

I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.

People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce.

Someday I'd love to come back and start a theater company in Boulder. That would be a dream come true.

I kind of want to get the music back on a road it hasn't been on for a while. I want to promote the arts as part of the American diet.

We have no companies now, not in the sense that I know, that nurture actors. It's very depressing that, given the money they get, the companies today don't number up in my estimation. They should be bringing on young talent, and they don't.

I'm interested in art for all. I don't want it to be only the sons and daughters of Tory MPs who get to see my plays.

[I am not for] spending the public money in the encouragement of the Fine Arts. Whether it is to be painting or sculpture, or both; if painting, what sort of painting, what are to be the subjects chosen, and who are to be the artists employed? All these questions furnish ample food for discussion, difference, and dispute.

There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way.

The unhappy irony is that, while 'Glee' is hitting the heights, school arts funding is being slashed across the country due to the steep recession and declining tax revenues.

My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?

In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.

Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.

What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.

I'm on Governor Gray Davis' California Alliance Towards Education to bring the arts back to high schools.

This funding from the National Endowment for the Arts has been like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.