Edward Zwick Quotes

I do worry because it takes all types to make our culture, to make our art. We need it to be available to all.

I think that some works are more accessible than others.

I can only hope that the American people who have often shown their liking for my work as a painter, realizing that their access to it is hindered by institutional and governmental control, will understand the compelling motives for my gift.

Writers do the self-censoring before they even get to the studio executive, because they know the film will not run that gauntlet. They, because they want to get their films made, they censor it.

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk.

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody.

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

I don't feel that censorship keeps me from doing the work, though. I'm my bigger censor.

People ask could I have written the show I wrote in 1990 now, and I don't think I could. I think it's much easier to offend people nowadays. People have grown quite sensitive, I think.

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.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

You do what you're supposed to do, but you have to be honest about what they're doing. When you do a comedy show on a network the problem is there are going to be a bunch of people who aren't comedians that are going to tell you what's funny.

The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

It would be horrible if there was no competition. It's what people want to see - they either like you or they don't. Not everybody likes Van Gogh. Or Bob Dylan! So you have Neil Young...or Ozzy Osbourne.

The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.

Nudity in photography, whether involving adults or children, is a subject sinking under a freight of political and moral disapproval it could never hope to support, and this is not the place for me to get out the bilge pump. I will only say that critics who tremble so fiercely at the thought of the voyeuristic male gaze miss the point that distance generates mystery and enchantment, and expresses the awe with which the male imagination regards all women.

I understand that people are afraid. Because I think censorship is about fear. It's just fear being projected onto art.

In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.