Yehuda Amichai Quotes

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

I think if you're going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can't just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.

It always surprises me when people say that the realm of the lyric is the personal, and the personal is not political. I just don't know how we can get to 2014 and say that with a straight face. When you think of a poet like Yeats, how can you say politics is not in the poem? When you think of Milosz, how can you say politics is not in the poem?

Politics itself is so unsexy, isn't it? But when the politics in creative works are really explored - not used as a vehicle - the results can be really interesting.

I like singing all songs, really, but I find that writing social commentary comes naturally.

If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

Ksenia Sobchak as president is like Sergei Shnurov as an artist. It's satire. It's a very high-level art project.

The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.

A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.

Movies by Carlos Saura and others had ghosts, memories from the past, that they used to make a political point. Things you couldn't talk about openly, you could speak of through ghosts.

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

Songwriting is just like any other kind of writing - it's either fiction or nonfiction. You can even get into philosophy and politics, which I've done on occasion.

Songwriting I think, or any art form, the inspiration comes from your personal life or it can be from politics or region you live in.