Creative Restriction Quotes

I come from a creative background, and everything I enjoy is entertaining or playing music for people, which is the exact thing the Community restricts and opposes. At least still playing games with the kids and being active, not completely awful.

I believe in limitations. I think the worst art ever made - in my opinion, because it's all so subjective - is where the artist had complete freedom.

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.

I can't copy nature.

When I sit behind that electronic drum, it dominates me; there is no innovation in composing music like that.

If you are playing repertoire material, you're stuck. There's not huge amounts you can do.

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

You can only be as good as your audience. Sometimes you can be as bad as your audience, but you have to remember you can never be better than them.

My work as an actor is limited by the voice of the director and the writing.

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

In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.

Art degraded, Imagination denied.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

I think there are unseen powers who don't want pop music to be anything other than glorified Madonnas.

As there is in Germany - as well as in Russia and Italy - no art which is not approved of by the government, any criticizing remark about the present policy made by me would easily be taken as a hostile act. I cannot have my name put up against an official report from Germany without risking very unpleasant consequences.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

That is one thing I really hate about working in TV - you have to shape episodes to exact time-lengths, do like 22 minutes, and it is just so against what you are making.

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.

There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.

More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.

I don't deal well with being told what to wear and sit on a mark. It just feels like my soul is being ripped out.

People have been very resistant to giving me more than the standard amount of money. So I keep making films on a similar scale. Which is fine, but also frustrating.

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

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.