Jeff Buckley Quotes

I guess the majority of people who want to ban certain musicians are the ones who are so proud of everything America stands for.

I must say here in France I had more serenity or security as I was working because I knew I was making the film the way I wished and that the film would be seen, ultimately, which is not always the case in Iran. In Iran, you always work having in mind this worry of will I be able to carry on my project as I wish and will the audience see the film.

Music is an artform, and I always though art was beyond censorship. I thought this was a common view. Apparently, I was wrong.

To have art suppressed is very dangerous to society.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

What I'm very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

There shouldn't be any censorship on making a film.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

People always ask me 'do you think there should be more bands doing political music?' and I say 'absolutely not.'

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and 'clean' versions be made for them to carry.

When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.

Cable had a latitude to move which created less censorship and bestowed upon the artists, the writers and the creators, more liberty to create their shows.

Performers have the right to say what they want to, and anyone paying money has the right to accept or reject the art and entertainment that's available.

Listen, anybody who has a film festival has the right to show what they want.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

There was an exhibition in Munich in 1937, 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by Klee, Kandinsky, Beckmann and many others. The work was called 'sick' and put in the trash heap. The sentiments expressed toward contemporary art by Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson and Mayor Giuliani recall the language used by the Nazis.

The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

When censorship is intelligent, it will stop a film before it is made. If not, it is too late.

I do not want to see censorship, yet I don't believe a dime of taxpayer money should go into art that is clearly and visibly filth.