Mary Renault Quotes

Even if censorship might encourage creative ways to circumvent it, it still slows down progress and our ability to realise our full creative potential. And that is why I vehemently fight against it.

The most interesting stuff happens when an authoritarian government removes itself a little and gives this margin of freedom. And then art is grabbed with both hands.

Censorship, telling people how to live their lives I completely disagree with.

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

I believe for freedom. I believe that people should express themselves the way they want, except as it does in the way that's not nice, but it is what it is.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

The more words we are allowed to take, the freer we become. If our mouth is banned, then we attempt to assert ourselves through gestures, even objects. They are more difficult to interpret, and take time before they arouse suspicion.

There shouldn't be any censorship on making a film.

It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.

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?

You can only be free as an artist if you're free as a person.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

Art must not serve might.

People can dress you the way they want, they can do your makeup the way they want, but they can never take away your voice.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

It had never crossed my mind that a man could think he had the right to stop me from being who I was.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Years of imprisoning and beheading writers never succeeded in shutting them out. However, placing them in the heart of a market and rewarding them with a lot of commercial success, has.

I can't be a spokesman for anything other than my own concerns. I have to be free to wrestle with my own preoccupations, and if I'm bringing any political awareness to that process, that mitigates my freedom.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

You work your butt off and somebody says you can't have your record played because it offends them. Tyrants are made of such stuff.

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.