F. Sionil Jose Quotes

The arts have always been an important ingredient to the health of a nation, but we haven't gotten there yet.

I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.

We say arts education is good for general education, but that's not the point. The arts are what great nations are remembered for. They are a mirror.

The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature and help to shape our identity. The arts are not a frill and should not be treated as such.

Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers.

We need to have a view that culture has a value in itself, not just in terms of a social and economic value.

We want young people to get every opportunity to experience culture, to understand it and to think it is for them.

In Europe they understand that the arts are incredibly important both culturally and economically.

Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.

The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.

Queen Victoria did not regard art, letters, or music as in any way springing from national character: they were something quite apart, elegant decorations resembling a scarf or a bracelet, and in no way expressive of the soul of the country.

The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.

There are a lot of wonderful things created in our culture that have been ignored that can speak to them.

The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist.

I've always argued, unsuccessfully, that there's no point in giving money to the arts unless you educate people in them.

The older I get, I'm really reminded how important the arts are to our wellbeing as a society.

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.

People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

We have to remind people how important arts are. People just don't see it.

No country is fully civilized which cannot appreciate its artists. They make a contribution not just to the entertainment side of life, but to the educational, economic and spiritual sides.

When the arts are taken out of the syllabus, people are not going to know what it's like to value the theater.

I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.

The value of the arts cannot be measured by its ability to preserve life but rather to enhance existence.

I am extremely proud of my heritage, and I would never use being Dutch as an excuse but rather an explanation of our cultural differences.