Amitava Kumar Quotes

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

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

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

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

Politics itself is so unsexy, isn't it? But when the politics in creative works are really explored - not used as a vehicle - the results can be really interesting.

It's interesting that we assign the label 'political' to art that doesn't just fit a mould of status quo. Is 'Downton Abbey' not political? That's political! Every piece of art offers a perspective on the world. And what is politics if not a perspective on the world? 'Downton Abbey' is about class. It's also about race.

All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.

I do think that part of literature's job is to comment on and participate in the social issues of the time.

Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

Politics are always involved, even in my love songs.

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

There's nothing more political than fantasy.

My favorite bad thing about 'Three Billboards' is its ambition to play around with America's ideological and geographical toys.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

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

My art gets called political, as opposed to my intending it to be political. I think that's something that happens with black artists or marginalized voices trying to speak truth. Because there are things in the status quo to speak out against, speaking out against them will inherently be political.

The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country's injustices and contradictions down on paper. Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

I think my films are always political, even if I don't put explicitly political things in them.

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.

I'm thrilled with the work Tim Palen and his marketing team have done on the film. It's appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes 'Catching Fire' while simultaneously promoting the Capitol's punitive forms of entertainment.