Bernard Williams Quotes

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music.

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.

Music is always a reflection of what's going on in the hearts and minds of the culture.

All films speak to their times. It becomes obvious only after.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

I think art can reflect tragedy.

I admit there's an element of brutality in all my work - it's part of the truth about human existence I always want to explore - but the last thing I'm trying to do is put on some kind of freak show, inviting people to get off on other people's pain and humiliation.

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

All literature is political.

The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book.

In any film there's always a historical implication.

In America, there's more of the question, should music be political or should it just be for entertainment purposes, whereas around the world that's not even an issue. I think people just assume that music should be everything.

Fashion is an expression of a time, of a place, of history. It's putting things into context.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

To do art, one thing should always remember - subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence.