Robert Musil Quotes

A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.

Popular sings are the only art form that describes the temper of the times.

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

As an artist, you're just observing the world around you. So much is overwhelming and it's all so inescapable that it can't all speak to general cultural statements.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age.

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires.

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.

The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.

I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.

Part of being an artist is being able to write about the world you live in and the times that you've been a part of.

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

I work in musical theater because people keep writing quality stories in the genre, and I'm really all about investing in a piece that says something about our current time, that is, a reflection on who we are today.

I think art always comments on the time and place it was created.

Fashion is kinda a joke. I don't get too bogged down in the clothes. For me, it's one big art project, just a canvas to show that fashion should have a brand which has someone behind it who cares about different contexts. Social things.

I never try and send messages through my feature films; it's always naturally woven in and comes through on its own, as that's the way I think about society.

I believe films are the mirror of society we live in.

The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that - to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.

It's extremely important that plays reflect contemporary times and should not just be about asking for social change without having any connect with the audience.

We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture - by art, if we're lucky. And it's amazing how often people have lost sight of this.