H. L. Mencken Quotes

Art is art. Politics is politics. It's very hard to get them together.

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He's supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn't part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.

The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business.

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

If art is singular expression, then by nature, the best art is controversial. But when art stirs debate for reasons besides its artistic integrity, that's when things get bent.

Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics.

All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

I think there is a debate in the arts about, you know, whether we must strive for art for art's sake, and you know, kind of try to keep political debate out of our work. And to that I say, I'd like you to show me an example of, you know, this so-called apolitical art. I don't think there's any such thing.

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

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

Making art in America is sort of a political statement in and of itself. It's not the best environment for that sometimes.

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program ... and not for any other reason than that there is no political program -- any more than there is a theory of tragedy -- which can encompass the complexities of real life.

I really want to become, like, a composer for my people, my country that will photograph the things that are happening now in story and in life and love but not only, like, the love of a couple, you know, the love in general.

My films are a reflection of the society I live in, what I see and observe.

I like to make broader strokes with politics in my work.

Didacticism is the death of art.

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

My drawings and paintings were done as an act of protest; I was trying by means of my work to convince the world that it is ugly, sick and hypocritical.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

I think when people try to use their art for political views, I think they're art becomes smaller, less interesting. And so for me, as an artist, I'm trying to speak about things in a universal way and not be pedantic or small-minded and try to convince other people of my political views. But having said that, every day I live in sort of complete terror because of what I read in the newspaper and what is going on in the world. I'm constantly, as I think many of us are, overwhelmed by the sort of, mass psychosis that's occurring.