Mark Shields Quotes

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

If an artist is going to take money from the taxpayers I guess he's got to be prepared to have the taxpayers dissatisfied with the product.

Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe that an artist has to take some moral responsibility for what he or she is putting out there.

Artistic imagination must remain free. It is by definition free from any fidelity to circumstances, especially to the intoxicating circumstances of history.

A good banker isn't careless with pennies; a good leader isn't sloppy about details.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

Celebrity doesn't really affect the work. What affects the work is the expectations from the outside. This is what no one understands.

It would be the death of all creativity for me if I had to sit there and be concerned with the sensibilities of a fourteen-year-old kid. Some fourteen-year-olds would revel in the book, and some would be very sensitive to it, so you can't afford to worry about that. What I worry about is good taste and getting my message across by whatever means I can.

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

Hollywood people don't want to be embarrassed by being involved with someone who isn't happening and cool at the time. But I never made the movies for the critics; I've done the best I could with the material and the directors and the actors I had. But the thing that's really exciting is that once I do that one project that's different, that stands out, everyone's gonna be watching.

The push and pull of representing your world responsibly and your artistic license is a tricky balance.

I think no matter what you do, a certain amount of people are going to call you a sellout, somehow, you know. If I ever start trying to make a living on it.

If you got a dollar, soak it away, put it in a savings bank, bury it, do anything but spend it. Spending when we didn't have it put us where we are today. Saving when we've got it will get us back to where we was before we went cuckoo.

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.

Why don't somebody print the truth about our present economic situation? We spent six years of wild buying on credit - everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not - and now we are having to pay for 'em, and we are howling like a pet coon.

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist...You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it.

We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.