Peter Brook Quotes

I really don't like plays or movies that service propaganda.

All literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature...

I don't like things I work on to have political didacticism - there are questions, but not messages.

I will not have the Federal Theater used politically.

Art can be political, but when it becomes politicized, the purity is ruined.

There is no patriotic art.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Art functioning as propaganda is not art.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

... the great artists ... do not want security, egoistic or materialistic.

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.

For a poet, style is the only morality.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

One of the things I love about doing things that are creative is that I feel like it's my right as an artist not to be affected by the reactions of those people that are going to hear my songs.

Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide now where he stands. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.