Gavin Newsom Quotes

An artist will starve unless he is near big centers of population. We should create many of these cultural centers right in our own slums.

Queen's University flies the flag for the arts in Northern Ireland and beyond.

What I am out to do is make sure that the Met continues to be the most exciting encyclopedic museum in the world. I want to sustain the vibrancy that makes it exciting to work here, that makes it exciting for visitors. The art remains central.

Less money for public media means less access to the arts.

The commercial and subsidised theatre are intrinsically linked. I wouldn't have had the career I have had without the opportunities I had through the subsidised sector. However, I do think, in any walk of life, subsidy for the sake of subsidy is not always healthy.

I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.

Another turn in my life happened when I took on the Canada Council.

As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.

Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

We need more theatres, more art and more culture in this country.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

When I first started coming to New York in the early Nineties and seeing the vitality of the programme compared to what was going on back in London or Paris, it was just in a different league. It's like a 16th-century court.

You see, my ambition was not to confound the engineering world but simply to create a beautiful piece of art.

My tax dollar, which goes to New York State Council on the Arts, is by and large only spent to fund people from the state of New York! And you want to be the cultural capital of the world?

I can’t go around being on committees and thumping for government subsidies for art—I hate committees!

The arts are part of the fiber of American society and should get Federal support.

The arts need funding.

The arts are suffering amongst public schools, but also, minority theater companies are struggling, and I firmly believe in freedom of expression through the arts.

The success of the arts has come through a mix of public subsidy, substantial private support, and good box-office receipts, but central to Labour's post-1997 programme has been a determination to increase access as much as excellence.

I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.

I feel like Canada is really good at nurturing their artists, and America's not so good at that. The artistic community is so important to a country.

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.