This funding from the National Endowment for the Arts has been like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
Mr. Chairman, obviously a $60 million cut in the National Endowment for the Arts would be a disaster.
Individual and corporate support is vital to building on London's leadership in the arts, and I hope others will join me in wanting to build on the National's role at the heart of modern theatre and sustaining it long into the future.
My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.
It is not true that I oppose government funding of the arts.
We should not have a tin cup out for something as important as the arts in this country, the richest in the world. Creative artists are always begging, but always being used when it's time to show us at our best.
As an artist I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the Arts and Government.
In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it.
Certainly, 'creativity' has been a vital plank of New Labour strategy. It not only hands out money with the enthusiasm of a Medici, but also invites the talented arts world into the very heart of government.
Must we be put to shame by much smaller and poorer countries, by Ireland, France, Austria or Sweden, who have understood that a nation's support of its arts is a matter of both national pride and cultural survival?
Lillian Gish thought that there should be a cabinet position for the arts and I think she was right. I think she was right.
I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.
If there's ever a moment when I am an Anglophile, it's when I see so many theatres in this country that have what I would call federal funding.
Fortune ought to be a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.
The type of music we know as classical music began with rich people hiring musicians or owning them in a way. Without funding, it's very hard to have this experience. Be it state money or private money, there has to be someone dedicated to raising the money.
Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.
