John Sayles Quotes

What a blast it is to be here with Michael Moore.

Michael Moore became an industry hero and the most visible symbol of the Hollywood left.

… slobby Michael Moore

I like Michael Moore, but I think of him more as a rabble-rouser.

I think Michael Moore is a hero. I love him.

The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it - politics - was important... that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.

I want to give Michael Moore a run for his money.

I think Michael Moore is a hero.

You know, I'm a comedian the same as Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. We all came up the same way. The three of us have interest in politics; I call us fundits, we're fundits! We're not pundits!

You can be Michael Moore and make 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' but that's hitting people over the head, and a lot of Americans don't like to be hit over the head. I want to make films that make people walk out and say, 'Wow, I really question if this is all right.'

I really like and admire Michael Moore.

Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong.

I don't write political stuff. I'm sure I've made attempts, but I don't tend to write very topical things, either. I admire those people who do because it's a talent I don't have.

That's the thing about Michael Moore, when you read his stuff, he's so sure he's right about everything; even when he's wrong, he's entertaining.

They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.

I think about politics, so it would be inauthentic not to talk about it.

If you've never seen me perform live, I'm a must-see. I'm very funny. I have a different perspective sometimes on a lot of what I do and the world itself, especially America.

I don't want to be an old man in a pub singing about Margaret Thatcher.

I love the Tea Party. They are the ultimate beer goggles. They make everything look better.

If there are political programs on TV, yet it takes an artist to actually energize political debate, that tells you something really quite frightening about the level of the political debate happening on mainstream channels - right-wing-biased mothers.

The bipartisan approach filtered up through my typewriter. I used to say, "Mad takes on both sides." We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. Mad was wide open. Bill loved it, and he was a capitalist Republican. I loved it, and I was a liberal Democrat. That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice. But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all.

The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education.

Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture. It's one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.