Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.
Art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.
Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy.
All art is a revolt against man's fate.
Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
I've always considered myself something of a musical rebel.
Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal.
I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.
A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»
The truest protest is beauty.
A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.
Art defies defeat by its very existence, representing the celebration of life, in spite of all attempts to degrade and destroy it.
An artist should always bite the hand that feeds him - but not too hard.
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art.
So I have no grounds to complain; on the contrary, writers should consider the condition of permanent controversiality to be invigorating, part of the risk envolved in choosing the profesión. It is a fact of life that writers have always and with due consideration and great pleasure spit in the soup of the high and mighty. That is what makes the history of literature analogous to the development and refinement of censorship.
To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.
The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
People told me I couldn't kill Nicholson, so I cast him in two roles and killed him off twice.
in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.
I don't take trouble at all to conform a screenplay to my iconography. I don't say, "We can't do that - the audience wouldn't accept it." I try to take the limitations of what is required to play a leading character and then screw with them.
Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.
