Barbara Demick Quotes

I've been reading a lot about North Korea ever since I got the part in 'The Interview' because it's just such a fascinating place. There are so many amazing stories of bravery coming out of there.

The scene that has raised the most objections in 'The Interview' is at the very end, when Kim's head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous.

The media doesn't always reflect reality.

Occasionally, the horrors of life in North Korea do show up in our American satire.

One of the jobs of comedy is to expose hypocrisy. When you look at countries like Iran or North Korea that don't have freedom of speech, we who do should push it as far as we need to.

Most people in the country didn't - and might still not - know about how powerful the United States is. They think North Korean weapons are the best in the world, and they're very proud of them. They believe they can protect the country from anyone.

If Kim Jong Un and his henchmen were upset before, wait till they see the movie we're going to make.

If Sony's not going to show 'The Interview,' that's it. No more North Korean movies for me.

We've seen the uproars around the world concerning cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad. Anyone who does not think comic strips are relevant never had a fatwa put on him/her for drawing a picture.

Movies like 'The Interview' and 'Team America: World Police' don't often show the realities of life in North Korea and the human rights violations perpetrated by the government there.

This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.

Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blithering savant, perhaps.

When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.

There are different opinions across the Middle East of Al-Jazeera. They've been kicked out of Egypt and Jordan and then let back in; they've been totally banned from Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria.

Americans think Soviets are so grim. I want them to see that they can smile.

I've thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent.

Religion and political cartoons, as you may have heard, make a difficult couple, ever since that day of 2005, when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world - demonstrations, fatwa, they provoked violence. People died in the violence.

The Arab Press is a deeply distorted lens.

The one source of criticism even the most repressive authoritarian leader cannot silence is the outside world. Autocrats are usually thin-skinned and like to be admired, so at least, at first, they often seek to be praised abroad.

I'm pretty disappointed in Sony Pictures' decision to pull 'The Interview' under pressure from North Korea.

People use the guise of art, and artistic expression, to do all kinds of hateful things. It's like Trump and everybody else using the guise of humor to say hateful things, the excuse being, 'I was just being funny.'

North Korean defectors who speak out against the regime always feel nervous. We never know what the North Korean government is planning. It's really difficult for us to show our faces and speak out, but we feel obligated to do something to inform people about the ongoing tragedy inside North Korea.

Staying in China provided me with the opportunity to adjust to life outside of North Korea and to gain a sense of perspective, most importantly, by learning that so much of what I had been taught about my country was a lie.

I would welcome satirical references to political leaders as part of freedom of expression.

Although it is hard to see why any sensible authority would feel threatened by the peaceful expression of one's point of view, there is a long history of trying to repress subversive depictions of political figures - back in the 19th century, for example, France's King Louis Philippe was depicted as a piece of fruit.