Nellie McKay Quotes

Music should never be harmless.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.

I love finding out-of-the-box inspirations and blending them with what I've done in the past. And when I started to experiment with genres, it didn't sound forced. Maybe that's because it's all music that I listened to growing up, and it's all music that I love.

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

I want to put concepts in front of people that make them laugh or smile or even hate what I do. I'm not interested in just putting clothes in stores.

I don't see that many movies lately that are actually about something, that are trying to challenge something about the way that people interact.

I really like the pop culture materials of everyday life, but used in some way that elevates them to something you notice and care about.

Marilyn Manson is a criticism of gimmickry, while being itself a gimmick.

I still have to say that I did 'Dirty Pretty Things' 11 years ago. That was a very sudden shift in my life and my relationship to my work, and it didn't feel it was impossible to make a film like that.

What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.

I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?

The best cartoons work by making fun of sacred cows, in trying to inflict the uncomfortable.

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

I think that's always the goal of art, is to make people ask themselves questions.

I think the job of artists is to stir things up.

Movies should make people uncomfortable sometimes.

If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren't even asking questions anymore at all.

I've always had creative freedom. Instrumental rock wasn't really a genre, but the success of 'Surfing With the Alien' legitimized my approach.

I work very hard to line up stereotypes and then smash them with a hammer.

'Take Her Up to Monto' is a very satirical song. I don't really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn't. It's a bit cheeky calling it 'Take Her Up to Monto,' but the whole idea was to be very irreverent.

We've always been a band that questions things.

As an artist, even if you are putting out something really dark and disturbing, that's good because it's opening a discussion. Always in the back of my mind is this thought that the world has to be a better place with you in it.

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.