Philip Roth Quotes

It's so nice to be totally artistically free.

I love this freedom that has been given to me as an artist to express myself.

I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.

We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.

The nice thing about the world that I've been able to inhabit for the last couple of years is that I'm given a lot of freedom. Not all artists really get that.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.

No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My sin as a painter is that I just want to paint anything I want to paint - and repaint.

I've been very lucky in the freedom that I've been given. Every artist needs two types of freedom: You need the freedom to - the freedom to come up with an idea or treatment - and then you need the other half of the freedom, and that's freedom from - somebody saying, 'This is great. This is how I want you to do it.'

My ethos is musical freedom: to create whatever I want.

I am comfortable doing independent music; it gives me more freedom as an artiste.

Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.

I believe all of us should have the freedom to have our personal take on how art affects us.

I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.

Make music when I want to in whatever style I would like to. That is something that I know that I'm not the only Nightwish member who has that. That's a luxury we can take, and we will.

It's much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you're kind of stuck drawing in a style you've developed.

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.

I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction after all comes from a different, less rationally manipulable side of the brain. I am personally very attached to reactionary figures like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Céline.

If you do an indie film, where it's like, "We don't have a lot of money to give you, but we'll really give you a lot of freedom," that's really a luxury to have in this business. At least for myself, because I'm still kind of earning my acting credibility.

There's a bit of hope that a song can be about anything. If you want to write a song about anything, you can, and you don't have to put it through the process of having it be trendy or cool or generic pop or these types.

Particularly as a writer, it is my job to ignore social critics, or the response that social critics might have when it comes to the opinions of my characters, the way they talk, or anything that can happen to them.

And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.

I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.