Don DeLillo Quotes

The artist is the consciousness of society... but musicians' role is very special.

All I've ever wanted to do is move the needle on popular culture.

The artist has tremendous power to change the world.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there. And I think if they take up this role seriously and link it to the kind of changes were wish to bring about in our country they could be a tremendous help.

I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.

Paul Robeson once said that the artist has the responsibility to either help liberate the community or further oppress it. And I think that when Eldridge Cleaver wrote it down it was interpreted as his, but there's a history of people saying things of that nature and meaning it. And what I do is in that tradition, in that mode.

As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

I believe the artist is capable of contributing to the broader evolution of culture in all of its dimensions.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society - not the whole outlook, and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.

Film is a tool of change.

I feel like art has been at the center of change since the beginning of time.

I do believe that painting can change the world.

I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.

If I've made it a little easier for artists to work in violence, great! I've accomplished something.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Creating music and just having someone's art directs the way you think about life subconsciously.

As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving.