Martin Donovan Quotes

People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.

We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.

I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.'

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

I'm drawn to that period, the '50s.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression - all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.

I think 'Holler If Ya Hear Me' is almost 'A Raisin in the Sun' 50 years later, with just a different 20-year-old voice speaking the words. But it's about access to the American dream and equal lives having equal value in America. It's still holding a mirror up to us so we can see ourselves.

The '60s is such an explosive period. It was very interesting for me because I grew up in Canada, and obviously, I know some American history because I've lived here for many years, and even in Canada, that does permeate.

I believe history of humankind has always faced challenges. I don't think that any other period in history was less problematic then the one in which we live.

What I'm interested in is modern American history. I'm taken with the changes that have occurred in America in my lifetime.

I'm not a 'dystopian, futuristic master': I'm a schnook walking the street. It's an insane reality we're living in, and I'm just trying to translate it for myself.

Yes, I've heard of the 'Mad Men' comparisons, but I like to think 'The Hour' has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.

I enjoy films like 'American Beauty' and want to do similar films that reflect our culture.

Characters work really well when they're reflective of the times that they're operating in.

I'm just gonna talk about being Nigerian-American. I'm gonna talk about being single. I'm gonna talk about what happened to me on the train today. I'm gonna talk about so many other things that, as a comic, you're able to talk about because you see the world in sarcasm.

In the first place, I insist that our fathers did not make this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free. I insist that they found the institution of slavery existing here. They did not make it so, but they left it so because they knew of no way to get rid of it at that time.

The Founders were right all along, but the results are a lot funnier than they intended.

I mean you look back at American history and American culture, it's pretty striking. I mean this has been the safest country in the world forever, and the most frightened country in the world.

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth; you can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

You have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.