Robert Harris Quotes

The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question.

We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality.

It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that 'Gangnam Style' is satire.

I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

We seek a logical understanding of mass violence, but war and civil strife rarely explode because of rational grievances. Complaints about oppression, poverty or injustice may serve as superficial catalysts, but few wars can be traced to objective decision-making by the dispassionate leaders of cool-headed populations. War is an act of passion, not of policy.

Although everything has a political connotation today, 'Mulk' is a social film, to be honest. It is not about any political leader, party or ideology.

I'm thrilled with the work Tim Palen and his marketing team have done on the film. It's appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes 'Catching Fire' while simultaneously promoting the Capitol's punitive forms of entertainment.

People of my generation in Portugal fell into the magic potion of political ideas. What was very funny about this revolution was that it did not bring wealth to the Portuguese. But it brought language, ideas. You'd go to the fish market, and all the women who were selling fish would call each other fascist, communist.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

It was just us lampooning our own peer group, saying, well hey, where did this stuff come from? And where does British guys get to be so good at it suddenly?

Write about society as news and treat it like sociology.

Sociological critics are waste makers.

For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.

Ryan Murphy, he basically tries to find something that's a pulse, a pressure point in our culture, and he grabs it, and he squeezes it. I think 'Freak Show' has a lot to do with the entertainment industry and the way we entertain ourselves: the objectification of people and the lengths we'll go for our own amusement.

I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.

As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.

The struggle between Communism and capitalism has been perverting people's analysis of social issues.

The complex origins of class cleavage in politics are not easily unraveled

It's interesting that we assign the label 'political' to art that doesn't just fit a mould of status quo. Is 'Downton Abbey' not political? That's political! Every piece of art offers a perspective on the world. And what is politics if not a perspective on the world? 'Downton Abbey' is about class. It's also about race.

There's nothing more political than fantasy.

I really like using genre to tell a story about characters but also use it as a Trojan horse to tell social or cultural commentary. That's where the best stuff, especially in the zombie genre, comes out of.

Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.

It's not about left and right, it's about common people and their issues.