Marjane Satrapi Quotes

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

I love my country, but I believe that we are too quick to censor nudity.

I can paint in jail.

I worked on movies with a lot of violence when I was a cinematographer, and it always bothered me. It's a personal thing. I wouldn't want my kids to see it. I certainly believe that freedom of expression shouldn't be taken away, but I also believe you can make movies that are thrilling and exciting without too much violence.

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.

One thing is sure — none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring. Certainly, the Thomas Committee is growing more ludicrous daily.

Filmmakers and artists always thrive during more liberal times.

Why I talk so seriously about art is that art is the only thing that helps people stay alive, and it is the only thing that has allowed people to create joy in this insane, suppressive universe. And art is the only thing that they can't get rid of. They've tried, but ultimately they can't stamp it out.

Art is where we make a stand. If we don't make it there, freedom of expression is lost for everyone - for artists, for journalists, and for everyday people.

But it's hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying fire in a crowded theater.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

To introduce a new play only six weeks after another has been banned is also a way to speak one's piece to the government. It proves that art and liberty can grow back in one night under the clumsy foot which crushes them.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

We live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

Political correctness is the fascism of the 90's, it is this rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your way of looking at things within very narrow boundaries or else you'll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge just that way of thinking, and certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries, that's also one of the purposes of art.

Artists tend to be people of strong character and opinion. Often they are dismissed in our culture if they don't fit a certain mainstream media mold. It's a reason why filmmakers are now releasing films online. Art, in any form can invoke various emotions and actions. I think some can be frightened of the power that a simple image can invoke and that's why they tend to shy away from it. But art documents moments in our history and that image is often what many people remember of a certain time.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.