Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

At the end of the day, I'm an artist. I may make work and decide to do something political, but it will come out of an artist's position. It won't come out of society telling me I have to. If I do, it's because I choose, as an artist, to do it.

The artist can be above political parties, he can belong in a political party, he can act in politics.

The second you feel a political imperative, it destroys your art.

I'm not trying to push my political agenda on anybody. I'll do that like any other citizen by giving money to a party or candidate I believe in. I don't mind going out and endorsing somebody I believe in. But when we're talking about my films, I don't think my politics should have anything to do with it.

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

Hopefully this is going to be a trend, the beginning of a movement to reclaim theater for the artist and not commerce. I think there's a level of fatigue. Artists are tired of having to create work that's then coopted by commercial demands. When you begin souping up the car, the car no longer feels like your own.

I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.

As a creative individual, I really go out of my way to avoid the corporate scene in terms of songwriting. If the first question is how much money is it going to make, I'm going to be in trouble anyway.

When you're working in service to a big project, there's always the question of, 'Is there total freedom to do what I think is right artistically, or is this a job?' It's okay for things to be a job. I'm perfectly comfortable working. I don't need to sit around and quench whatever personal artistic thirst I have at all times.

Rules limit you, and once you start thinking about what the audience wants or expects, it becomes a trap that a lot of artists fall into.

Young people have realised that an artist is in charge of what they're doing - this crazy cynicism that artists were puppets has disappeared.

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.

She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.

do i have political views? you bet! i think the best way to express them is in your work, and then get the hell off the stage

We need to give artists a lot of free room to create.

When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is.

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

Ninety-eight percent of blacks voted for President Obama. That means these people are tied to that political party in a way that's different from other groups of people. Certain rappers always want to represent the Democratic side because they know that's safe and that's what represents their community. I tend to just do what I feel is right by all people.

We must challenge to fight at every level, including Congress and to make that challenge political and to organize as a political party is how we get traction.

Tonight I am going with my wife to a Democratic party, where we're going to...try to be happy.

Here's the Republican Party with round heels for anybody who says the right thing at the current moment. Regardless of their record, regardless of their character, and regardless of who they are, it seems that if you say the right stuff now to the Republican ear, Steve Schmidt, they will say yes, no matter who you are.

I hope always to earn my living by my art without having ever deviated by even a hair's breadth from my principles... to please anyone or to sell more easily.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

I've always appreciated people like Graham Parker or Loudon Wainwright III, who spend their entire lives writing songs and working their asses off just to have complete artistic freedom. They're just sharing their lives with you through their music. That's the same kind of work that I'm trying to do, in my own weird way.