Toni Morrison Quotes

But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.

To be honest, I think, for me, the power is always with art. The art world clearly couldn't happen without art.

Why I talk so seriously about art is that art is the only thing that helps people stay alive, and it is the only thing that has allowed people to create joy in this insane, suppressive universe. And art is the only thing that they can't get rid of. They've tried, but ultimately they can't stamp it out.

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

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different.

The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like.

My paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

When demagogues and dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.

Art penetrates, no matter how many bans you put out.

With a pencil and paper, I could revise the world.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

There are always forces at work in a society, certainly in America, which are really forces of censorship -either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. And all art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

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.

Art ... is a force which blows the roof off the cave where we crouch imprisoned.

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

Art is no crime. It's every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.

The power of art is as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; it's just where war destroys, art inspires. But in order to inspire, you need to react to it. And, if it doesn't penetrate your mind, you can't react to it.

Artists tend to be people of strong character and opinion. Often they are dismissed in our culture if they don't fit a certain mainstream media mold. It's a reason why filmmakers are now releasing films online. Art, in any form can invoke various emotions and actions. I think some can be frightened of the power that a simple image can invoke and that's why they tend to shy away from it. But art documents moments in our history and that image is often what many people remember of a certain time.

Ever heard of anyone executed for distributing copies of Grimm's fairy tales? Imagine people trying to smuggle copies of Hans Christian Andersen's works into China? The Bible, which has been called a mere collection of myths has suffered all of these fates: even today, copies of the Bible are banned and burned. There's something about this ancient book that threatens and frightens those in power.