David Henry Hwang Quotes

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

I think the Prime Minister is the first to acknowledge that Malaysia's still got some work to do. Just like the United States, by the way, has some work to do on these issues. Human Rights Watch probably has a list of things they think we should be doing as a government.

[The director] has to, I feel, be one step back, not only from cinema, but also from politics and all these issues in order to tell and depict the situation that spreads to people.

Women need to take charge of their lives and be as dynamic and active as they can be. I know that some people feel that there's a negative connotation to the notion of feminism like it has some hidden and ugly undercurrent. But that's ridiculous. My mother was a feminist and she was very politically-minded and always anxious to defend women's rights and advance a lot of social issues for women.

I'm spontaneous when I'm onstage. If I feel like talking about a particular issue when I'm in the moment, then I will. I speak about women's rights a lot day-to-day, so that's an issue that's important to me for sure. And I'm not a fan of Donald Trump.

I don't want to move over to Beverly Hills. My goal is to make the movies I want to make and support the people I want to support. That's it.

In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

The goal is to keep the dialogue open. There are issues in the USA that a lot of people feel strongly about. The goal is just to fix those issues. To make progress on those issues.

The lack of racial diversity and gender diversity and the lack of female directors - those are not fashionable issues. And they're not issues that reside solely within the film industry.

The Supreme Court had the choice not only which way to rule, pro- or anti-gay marriage rights, but also how they were going to rule. They could have ruled just federalism, saying, "This isn't a matter for federal; this isn't a federal issue at all. States should decide it." Or they could decide it on equal protection grounds and say that, "Gay discrimination is wrong."

I just wanna affect the culture and wanna be able to support young people with goals that aren't just limited to rapping and producing.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

Policies that support families aren't political issues. They're personal. They're the causes I carry with me every single day.

Folks can look at this issue and read it and it can feel like medicine, it can feel epidemic. We wanted this to hit people in their gut, and the hope is that by doing that, we can get more people to think more deeply about these issues.

I'm just so amazed by people who are willing to share things that, in the past, no one would have ever talked about. Folks in popular culture being willing to take on issues, I think that is such a key part of having a culture shift and an institutional shift.

You see somewhere along the way, we've allowed the pursuit of fame and things to blind us to the issues that prevent us from moving upward.

Today, unfortunately, the right to vote seems to have become a partisan issue. Democrats seek to guarantee and expand voting rights. Republicans try to undermine and suppress voting rights.

Unfortunately I feel like a lot of the issues that the show [OJ Simpson ] was dealing with are still very much in the forefront of the American consciousness and the world consciousness today. Police misconduct was at the heart of the defense and Johnny Cochran did a masterful job at putting that defense at the forefront of the jury's conscience as opposed to the double homicide of Ron [Goldman] and Nicole [Brown Simpson].

The way in which we can promote peace, is by promoting sustainable management of our resources, equitable distribution of these resources, and that the only way you can actually do that, is that then you have to have a political, economic system that facilitates that. And then you get into the issues of human rights, justice, economic justice, social justice, and good governance or democratic governance. That's how it ties up.

A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."

It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out.

We work on macro issues and macaroni and cheese issues. When women are in the halls of power, our national debate reflects the needs and dreams of American families.

Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.

I don't try to force-feed it or put any things on the images until I'm making a painting. It's not photorealism. Photorealism's goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can't beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer. I don't want to go blind doing what a printer can do.