Christoph Waltz Quotes

All literature is political.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?

Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture.

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

I don't believe that art is just for entertainment. I want to create art that is meaningful in some way.

Unlike fashion, art isn't applied. It doesn't have to serve anybody. It doesn't have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about.

Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.

How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Most good art is left wing. It's a moot point whether there is any good right-wing art.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

I understand that, for some, everything is political.

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works - which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

A work of art is an echo chamber which repeats what people say about it.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

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.

People will say things after a screening that it affects them in a certain way, which is why I don't like to explain what certain things are about. I want them to have that. It limits people's ability to understand something if I say it's "about this." That's happened to us a bunch on this.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.