Elif Safak Quotes

Previously the same Polish audiences would have been pressured into seeing cinema made for adults, films made by us about those spheres of life that were significant for us and which should be significant for our society.

The black groups that boycott certain films would do better to get the money together to make the films they want to see, or stay in church and leave us to our work.

I think as the largest democracy in the world, we have self-conscious filmmakers who can handle sensitive themes.

Some of the greatest artists did their best work when they got political.

A lot of artists say, I'm not political. People are afraid of this word.

To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.

I took a political stance early on, but I don't think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

I hope that just what I sing about and how I relate to my audience is as much of a political statement as I need to make.

Obviously I don't want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct - I'm not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.

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.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

The arts tend to be more liberal. There tends to be more social relevance in the arts.

I have a very strong political outlook, and that is something I'd like to take more responsibility for in my life. I don't believe in utilising certain aspects of the power I have with celebrity to push that forward, but I would like to make some films that address some of those political issues.

I don't make that hard and fast distinction between political and nonpolitical writing. I write about what bothers me.

I wanted to make films that were culturally relevant in my own country, that challenged people, and that people talked about.

All literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature...

All political art is bad – all good art is political.

Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them

A bunch of comedians have gotten in 'trouble' for sharing their views. When an actor or an artist or might come out saying something political or whatever, then it becomes about that view.

I'm going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

I love how close you are to current affairs and social issues here in England. Out in L.A., you have to make an effort to look outside that little microcosm. It's almost like it's a virtual reality to imagine a problem there.

What pushes me forward is everything I have learned: political, social, cultural. I put all that into the clothes.