Denys Arcand Quotes

The censorship is such on television in the U.S. that films like mine don't stand a chance.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I love my country, but I believe that we are too quick to censor nudity.

I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.

I see the FCC responding to an already repressive society and raw censorship is the result.

How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show - it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.

The ultimate censorship is the flick of the dial.

I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

One thing about television in Britain is that they're so scared about complaints. It curbs a lot of drama.

There's hardly any governmental censorship in Korea.

Cable had a latitude to move which created less censorship and bestowed upon the artists, the writers and the creators, more liberty to create their shows.

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

If you care for the quality of life in our American democracy, then you have to be for censorship.

For thirty years the press has ceased to exist in Turkey. There are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no longer have any potency. If I dare, I would call them gelded newspapers or rather, to keep the local color, eunuchs.

One thing is sure — none of the arts flourishes on censorship and repression. And by this time it should be evident that the American public is capable of doing its own censoring. Certainly, the Thomas Committee is growing more ludicrous daily.

Regardless of the strength of the government's interest [in protecting children,] the level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox.

… most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.

I'm not against censorship in principle. Not at all. Some things should be censored.

In a feature film, the question of censorship always comes up.