Moral Message Quotes

If something is a comedy for the sake of just comedy's sake and it doesn't have a good message, I don't have an interest in being part of it. If something is just serious and scary with no good message, I don't want to be a part of it.

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.

Art should be life. It's an imitation of life. It should have some humanity in it.

It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.

Art is power. Art influences the mind, the nerves, the feelings, the soul. It carries messages of hope, hostility, derision and moral rebuke. It can fight material and spiritual evils and can transmit the ideals of a community now living, long past or soon to be born.

I like for there to be a moral, for the character to have gotten something out of the experience.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.

I've never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that's never been important.

The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

'An Inspector Calls' is a British classic, and I am thrilled to be working on this beautiful screen adaptation with Aisling Walsh.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

I'm trying to think overall. Some of our stories [Black Mirror], I think you're right in that they don't tend to have a message.

I think that both Luca [ Guadagnino]and I have a kind of resistance to the idea of a film holding a moral message because that would exclude so many people from feeling that it was their film and it's important for a piece of work to feel owned by every member of the audience.

I don't believe that art is just for entertainment. I want to create art that is meaningful in some way.

K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

I think art can reflect tragedy.

When you allegorize, you're gonna get everybody saved somehow.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

I try to tell a story that's good enough to win the right to integrate eternal themes into it. If it's poorly written or comes across as a sermon, then obviously you don't reach people, because they're aware that you're imposing something on a story that isn't innate to it.

I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

I don't want to act in a preachy movie just because that is more sensible. I don't watch that kind of cinema.

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Not counting 'Small Steps,' I think 'Holes' is my best book, in terms of plot, and setting, and the way the story revealed itself. It hasn't changed my life, other than that I have more money than I did before I wrote it. I'm still too close to 'Small Steps' to compare it to 'Holes.'