Varun Grover Quotes

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

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.

Censorship constrains art and limits its impact as much as it does with all free thought.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

You know I've had work banned.

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did.

When censorship is intelligent, it will stop a film before it is made. If not, it is too late.

The second you feel a political imperative, it destroys your art.

Music is an artform, and I always though art was beyond censorship. I thought this was a common view. Apparently, I was wrong.

We want to be presentable and respectable, but feel like we can talk freely about what we want to sing about - we don't need to cuss to have that bad-boy attitude, I guess.

To have art suppressed is very dangerous to society.

Art is where we make a stand. If we don't make it there, freedom of expression is lost for everyone - for artists, for journalists, and for everyday people.

Silence the artist and you have silenced the most articulate voice the people have.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.

It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

As soon as I found out how compartmentalized the industry was, I realized, Well, no wonder the cartoons are so bad.

Film is such a powerful medium. It's like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.