Roger Allam Quotes

The human element should be the two players on the court, not the officials. The best officials are the ones you never notice. The nature of the game made officials too noticeable a part.

I'm on a mission. If I can make even one person not enjoy something they're currently enjoying, it's all worth it!

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

I canceled the Russian shows because, from the days of the first Dire Straits album, I've supported Amnesty International. It's not a good thing to read about people being jailed for no reason, so I raised my hand and made a small objection. It was good to do - but where do you stop?

I never understood why movies don't have to be as responsible, or the responsibility stops with Rated R. I feel like music, you gotta - you put the sticker on it, you make the clean version, then you're explaining yourself, and then you have to do charities to offset what you just said. No one else has to do this!

I think that, as a show creator, you have to be very careful about what messages you're putting out into the world. That is a not always popular thing to suggest, because it feels very Tipper Gore-y, perhaps.

There's so much stuff in America that is very shameful. It's stuff that I can't endorse, but I still perform there.

I don't like the notion that artists have a responsibility to be political.

It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand by with an axe to kill him before he spoils it.

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.

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.

Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

For art to be 'unpolitical' means only to ally itself with the 'ruling' group.

Art should be on the side of humanity.

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

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.

I never take advice, good or bad. That would only encourage more of it.

No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.

Satires which the censor can understand are justly forbidden