Creative Oppression Quotes

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

I think I view the system the same way that Ayn Rand views the system - that it really oppresses those that create, if you will, and tries to take away from those that produce and give to the non-producers.

It is the greatest of crimes to depress true art and science.

In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.

The war being waged against the radical imagination, particularly around young people, is just startling. Young people are laboring under a burden of debt that so ties them to a survivalist mode of existence that it's impossible for them to dream anymore. Trying to recognize what the forces are that actually squelch the imagination is a lot more interesting to me than people who go and "find themselves" because they're no longer on the grid.

There's so much control, so many executive producers, so many people looking over their shoulder, so many people trying to second-guess the boss. The space for writers and directors and actors to be creative is zilch.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists.