I think it's legitimate to do satire. If you're going to write a book of satire on Marilyn Monroe or Madonna, you're not going to get their permission, because you're going to make fun of them!
A film that I love is 'Deliverance' from back in the day. You start out with these archetypal characters - the hero, the bookworm, the pacifist - and by the end, it's all turned upside down. I love that.
I don't see myself as a rock star. I don't see myself in that way. I'm interested in work that offers some sort of critical dialogue.
If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.
The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.
When I grow up, I want to have an exhibit called 'American Motel.'
I'm anti - the pussy generation. Not to be confused with pussy.
When I discovered Gil Scott-Heron, I discovered a musical hero, a man who spoke baritone truth to power over jazzy funk at a time when funky music was primarily about shake, shake, shaking your booty.
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.
Thanksgiving, when the Indians said, "Well, this has been fun, but we know you have a long voyage back to England".
My personal take on politics is I deal with social situations and cultural situations in my music and in my life. I have said on record many times that I haven't voted. I'm not the type of person who says, 'I'm never going to vote.' I think it's clear to me that our system has failed us.
I wanna grow up and be a critic.
It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.
I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations - that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, 'Your work is so commercial.'
The western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today.
What's great about 'The Daily Show' is I can use satire and push the envelope. I couldn't do that anywhere else. Even if I was a journalist.
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling.
The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.
'America is such a great country, we have fat poor people.' It's one of those jokes that doesn't hit people right away, because it's so prevalent that we don't get it.
I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.
I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.
Christopher Hitchens's autobiography, 'Hitch 22', is a poignant read and very interesting because I have a very poor knowledge of recent political history - or, for that matter, distant political history.
Humor helps ease the tension of race and the differences in society. If there wasn't comedy I don't know if Obama could have ever become president.
